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With over 1 billion members, LinkedIn is the biggest global online platform for professional profiles. Individuals and companies use it to store resumes, connect to colleagues, and promote their brands. Individual users can search and apply for companies and jobs, while companies can headhunt and advertise open positions.
LinkedIn also acts as a social media platform for its users, where they can share content and discuss their areas of expertise. All of this makes LinkedIn one of the largest databases of potential employers and employees – and a rich source of public information. One of the most effective ways to access this data is with LinkedIn web scraping.
Apify Store has over 100 LinkedIn scrapers. These scrapers make it easier for you to access and use that public LinkedIn data.
The LinkedIn Company URL Finder scraping tool extracts LinkedIn company page URLs and delivers them to you in a neat, organized list, ready to download as structured data. Just feed it a company name or a list of companies you want to find on LinkedIn, and you get a list of URLs back. It’s quick, it’s simple, and it’s cheap.
LinkedIn People Finder does the same thing, but for personal profiles. You give the web scraper a name or a list of names, and it extracts the URLs of their LinkedIn profiles, helping you determine if Sales Navigator is worth it for your specific needs.
👮 Is it legal to scrape LinkedIn?
Web scraping is legal. This scraper is extracting publicly available URLs from a simple Google search. If you want to learn more about web scraping and its legal implications, you can find more information in our article on the legality of web scraping.
📇 Why scrape LinkedIn URLs?
Having a list of LinkedIn URLs for companies or people that you are interested in can be useful in lots of ways.
Here are our 4 favorites:
1. Job hunting
You’re hunting for the perfect job, and you want all the URLs of the companies you would like to work for at your fingertips. If you scrape a list of URLs, you won’t have to search for the company pages every time you look for open positions. You can even get really organized and use the list in a spreadsheet or database. You can rapidly access their pages anytime and quickly apply for a position through their LinkedIn page.
2. Recruiting and headhunting
Over time, LinkedIn has become a go-to place for recruitment across the globe. If a list of candidates applied for a position at your company, you'll want to have their resumes easily available. With LinkedIn People Finder, you can scrape the profile URLs so you won’t have to singularly look for them every time you need to consult them. Or maybe you want to go hunting for that perfect candidate, even if they're not currently looking for you.
3. Client database
If you're building a database of potential clients to contact, LinkedIn is a great networking tool for this purpose. It will definitely make it easier if you have all the LinkedIn page URLs in a list for your marketing or sales team, because looking for LinkedIn company pages manually can be really time-consuming. This scraper will give your sales team quick and easy access to the contacts so that they can spend more time chasing leads and making deals.
4. Market research
You want to stay up to date on what your competitors are up to and track their recruiting strategies. A list of all their URLs will make your market research much easier. You will be able to easily connect to their LinkedIn feeds and analyze their branding and the content they are sharing. You’ll be able to review what logo design they use, what kind of keywords and phrases they promote, or what content formats they distribute the most.
🤖 Can I use AI to scrape LinkedIn?
AI is currently unable to scrape websites directly, but it can help generate code for scraping LinkedIn if you prompt it with the target elements you want to scrape. Note that the code may not be functional, and website structure and design changes may impact the targeted elements and attributes.
📌 How to scrape LinkedIn company pages
Let’s start with a quick guide on how to use LinkedIn Company URL Finder. With these few easy steps, you will be able to extract all the company page URLs you want!
Step 1. Find LinkedIn Company URL Finder
Go to the LinkedIn Company URL Finder page on Apify Store and click the Try for free button.
If you’re not signed in, you’ll find yourself on the sign-up page. Sign up using your email account, Google, or GitHub.
You will be redirected to the scraper’s page on Apify Console. Apify Console is your workspace to run tasks for your scrapers.
Step 2. Type in or copy-paste company names
LinkedIn Company URL Finder only requires two input fields:
- Company names refers to the names of the companies of which you want to extract the LinkedIn page URL. You can type or copy and paste a list of company names here. Make sure that you only have one company name per line.
- Speed refers to the number of bots you want to start in parallel. The higher the number, the faster the search. However, a higher number also means you will burn through your available proxies quicker.
Step 3. Click Start ▶ to begin scraping
Once you’re all set, click the Start button. Notice that your task will change its status to Running, so wait for the scraper's run to finish. It will be just a minute before you see the status switch to Succeeded.
Step 4. View scraped data
The search will create as many results as the number of companies you listed in the input phase. Move to the Storage tab containing your scraped data in many formats, including JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and RSS feed. You can preview the data by clicking the preview button or viewing it in a new tab if the dataset is too large.
Step 5. Download scraped LinkedIn company data
As you have noticed, the search will create as many results as the number of companies you listed in the input phase – in our case, three of them. You can preview the data by clicking the preview button or viewing it in a new tab if the dataset is too large.
👩🔧 How to scrape LinkedIn for personal profile pages
And now for LinkedIn People Finder. You will notice most of the steps are very similar for the two scrapers.
Step 1. Find LinkedIn People Finder
Go to the LinkedIn People Finder page on Apify Store and click the Try for free button.
If you’re not signed in, you’ll find yourself on the sign-up page. Sign up using your email account, Google, or GitHub.
You will be redirected to the scraper’s page on your Apify Console. Apify Console is your workspace to run tasks for your scrapers. You can now click again the Start your free trial button and confirm that you want to start using LinkedIn People Finder.
Step 2. Type in or copy-paste profile names
LinkedIn People Finder only requires you to fill in the people names field, i.e. the names of the people for which you want to extract the LinkedIn page URL. You can type or copy and paste a list of people’s names here. Make sure that you only have one name per line.
If you want to restrict the search field for the scraper, in the next field, you can select a language for the profile. The scraper will only show you the results available in that language.
Step 3. Click Start ▶ to begin scraping
Once you’re all set, click the Start button. Notice that your task will change its status to Running, so wait for the scraper's run to finish. It will be just a minute before you see the status switch to Succeeded.
Step 4. View scraped data
Move to the Storage tab to see the results of your scraping. The search will create as many results as the number of people you listed in the input phase. In our case, it's two. The Storage tab contains your scraped data in many formats, including JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and RSS feed.
Step 5. Download LinkedIn profile data
Preview the data by clicking the preview button or viewing it in a new tab if the dataset is too large. You can pre-select certain fields before downloading the dataset. You can now upload it onto your computer for further use as spreadsheets or in other apps and your projects.
If you found LinkedIn Company URL Finder and LinkedIn People Finder useful, you might also like to try out Email ✉️ & Phone ☎️ Extractor. It will extract emails, phone numbers, and other useful contact information from any list of websites you provide. Great for lead generation!
