Past Employees API: A Warmer Lead
By Kooperativa Engineering
A person who used to work at a company you are trying to sell into, or trying to research, already knows its products, its internal culture, and often its actual buying process, not the version a website describes. That makes a company's past employees a meaningfully warmer audience than a cold list built purely from firmographic filters.
How this differs structurally from current employees
A past employees endpoint paginates differently than most list endpoints, because "how many people have ever worked here" is a much larger and more open-ended number than "how many work here now." Rather than a total count, the response signals whether more pages exist:
{
"company_id": "2135371",
"results": [
{
"id": "b9847f21-...",
"full_name": "Jane Doe",
"current_title": "VP Engineering at Acme",
"current_company": "Acme Corp",
"past_positions": [
{ "company_name": "Stripe", "title": "Engineering Manager" }
]
}
],
"page": 1,
"per_page": 25,
"has_more": true,
"next_page": 2
}What past_positions actually tells you
Each result carries the specific role held at the target company, not just the fact that they once worked there. That distinction matters for outreach: someone who was a senior engineer for four years is a different conversation than someone who was an intern for three months, and the endpoint gives you enough to tell the two apart without a follow-up enrichment call.
Sort order and what it implies
Results are ordered by when the profile was most recently refreshed, not by tenure or seniority. That means the first page skews toward people whose profiles happen to be actively maintained or recently updated, not necessarily the most senior or most relevant alumni. Filtering or ranking further by title or current seniority after fetching is usually worth doing rather than trusting page order alone.
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