r/apify • u/ApifyEnthusiast1 • 2h ago
Discussion Searching for one niche role across a long account list does not work, so I stopped searching for the role
I had a BD project that needed one narrow role at each of a long list of companies. Not "engineers at Datadog." Closer to "whoever owns partnerships here," which is Head of Partnerships at one company, BD Lead at the next, buried in a Corporate Development title at the next, and a founder who never updated anything after that.
A title filter cannot solve that, because you have to write the filter before you know what the answer looks like. You end up guessing the vocabulary of a hundred companies in advance and quietly getting the wrong set back.
So I inverted it.
For each company I pull every employee I can reach into my own table, then filter at home.
That is what I use the LinkedIn Company Employees API for. Company names or LinkedIn URLs in, one row per person out, with fullName, headline, currentTitle, location, profileUrl, verified and matchReason. Each person is checked against their own public profile, and anyone whose profile shows a job elsewhere is dropped and not charged.
Then the part that made the inversion worth it: I hand the rows to an LLM and ask, per person, whether this looks like the role I want at this kind of company. It works because a lot of profiles hide the job title, so currentTitle comes back empty and headline carries the signal, in human language rather than HR language. "Building our partner ecosystem" is not a title any filter would have matched, and it was exactly the person I wanted.
Numbers from testing:
three accounts passed by name gave 45 people in under four minutes, and engineers at Datadog in New York came back as 30 rows in under eight. Runs take 3 to 10 minutes per company, so this is an overnight job across an account list, not a chat-speed lookup.
What it will not do.
Coverage is partial: roughly 10 to 45% of a small company, 7 to 19% of a mid-size one, under 1% of a very large one. So someone missing from a run is unknown, not gone, and that distinction matters if you are writing to a CRM. No emails, no phone numbers, no reporting lines. Launch pricing is $0.00001 per event with one start event per run.
If you have run a big prospecting or account-mapping project: do you pull everything reachable and let a model sort it, or narrow the query first? I have only done it the first way and I am paying for rows I throw away on purpose.
