Employee Data API: Headcount, Current and Past Employees

Most company data tells you what a company is. An employee data API tells you who works there, which is a different and more useful question for a sales team. It answers three things from a single company identifier: how many people work there, who works there now, and who used to work there. Each is a separate endpoint, and each is worth understanding on its own terms.

Headcount by seniority breaks the workforce into leadership, VP, director, and individual bands so you can see the shape of an organization, not just its size. Current employees lists the people at a company right now, paginated and sorted. Past employees lists the people who left, which for a seller is a warm lead with a known employer.

The three are separate calls on purpose. Merging them into one bloated response would make the common case, a team that only needs headcount, pay for employee records it will never read.

Before you pull a single person, pull the headcount. It is one call, it is cheap, and it tells you whether an account is worth the people lookups at all. The response returns a total and a breakdown across bands, which lets you spot a top-heavy org or a fast-growing one before you spend anything on names.

The breakdown is explicit: a total plus per-band counts for leadership, VP, director, and individual contributors. A company with an outsized director band is structured differently from one that is flat, and that difference changes the pitch.

A past employee has already worked at the account you are trying to sell into, which makes them a lead with built-in context. The past-employees endpoint returns them with their roles, so you can find the person who left the prospect for a competitor, or the one who just moved into a role where they can now buy.

This endpoint pages by cursor rather than by page count, and it keeps the current company on each record precisely because that is the signal: where did this person go.

Every endpoint keys off the same company identifier, and each response is shaped to its question. The headcount call is the place to start.

Employee data describes the workforce, not the business. It will not tell you revenue, funding, or whether the company can afford you. It also will not give you contact details, by design. What it gives you is the most reliable account-fit signal that is not also a privacy problem, and that is usually the right first filter.