To find a public LinkedIn profile from a name, pass the full name — and the company whenever you have it — to a people-resolution API, which returns the person's public profile URL and a stable id. With Captain Data's Find People endpoint, one POST to /v1/people/find turns “Jane Doe at Acme” into a canonical /in/ URL and a uid you can enrich further. Adding the company is the single biggest accuracy lever — it disambiguates common names. And because it's a managed API over public profile data, there's no scraper to run and no email or phone involved.
#Resolve a name to a LinkedIn profile URL
Send the name to Find People (/v1/people/find) for 2 credits. A full name on its own works but may return several people for common names; a full name plus company name sharply narrows it to the right person. The endpoint treats your input as an exact phrase, so you don't need to add quotes.
Request — POST /v1/people/find with body { "full_name": "Jane Doe", "company_name": "Acme Corporation" }.
Response — the identifiers you need to go further:
- li_profile_url — the person's public /in/ profile URL.
- uid — a stable Captain Data identifier for the person.
- li_profile_id — the numeric LinkedIn profile ID.
#Then pull the full profile
Find People returns identifiers, not the full profile. Pass the uid or the URL to People Enrichment to get name, headline, current role, company, experiences, education, and skills as structured JSON. The full walkthrough is in how to extract data from a LinkedIn URL.
#Is it OK to find a profile this way?
Yes, within the usual rules. Captain Data resolves names to publicly available profile data through a managed, compliant API — you query a maintained endpoint instead of scraping LinkedIn, which breaches its terms and breaks constantly. It returns profile data (the public URL, name, headline, role, company), not personal contact details like email or phone. You stay responsible for a lawful basis under GDPR or CCPA; the API gives you an auditable source rather than an ad-hoc scraper.
#Why not just search LinkedIn manually
Manual search doesn't scale past a handful of lookups, and the results aren't structured — you still copy-paste each URL by hand. Scraping automates it but fights rate limits, layout changes, and LinkedIn's terms. A resolution API gives you the same answer as one repeatable, structured call against 750M+ profiles, so you can resolve a list of names in a loop instead of one browser tab at a time.
Start resolving — get an API key with 100 free credits, or see Find People in detail.