How to Find Company Employees by Specific Role in 2026

The VP of Sales you need to reach isn’t listed on the company website. The engineering manager you want to recruit has a professional profile, but so do 500 others with similar titles. The startup’s leadership team, which you’re researching before investing, shows three names publicly and hides the rest.

When you need to find employees of a company, scattered information across websites and directories wastes hours. You piece together incomplete team pages, outdated profiles, and business listings that show last year’s organizational chart. By the time you’ve manually built a list of 30 contacts, half of them have changed jobs.

This guide covers how to find employees of a company at different scales. You’ll see what employee data actually exists in public sources, which methods work when you need 10 contacts versus 1,000, and how people search APIs automate discovery.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Key Takeaways

• Employee search methods scale differently 

Manual research is used to find 5-10 specific people, while employee data APIs provide hundreds or thousands of current contacts across multiple companies.

• Combining filters creates precision

Searching by job title alone returns too many results. Filtering by title, company size, industry, funding stage, and location delivers targeted lists that match your exact criteria.

• Data freshness determines outreach success

Employee information changes constantly as people get promoted, change companies, or take new roles. Real-time APIs provide current employment status at query time instead of 30-90-day-old snapshots.

• Job titles vary across companies

The same role appears as "VP Engineering," "Vice President of Engineering," "Head of Engineering," or "Engineering VP", depending on the organization. Filter by seniority level and department to catch all variations.

• APIs eliminate manual research bottlenecks

Real-time employee data APIs like Crustdata deliver 1B+ profiles with 60+ filters, turning weeks of manual research into minutes of automated queries with current employment data.

Why You Need to Find Employees of a Company

Employee information solves specific business problems that cost real time and money when you’re working without it. The scenarios vary, but the core challenge stays the same: you can’t reach the right person, hire the right candidate, or assess the right opportunity if you don’t know who works where. Here’s why different teams need this data:

• Sales prospecting: Build lists of decision-makers at target accounts instead of cold-calling reception desks and getting transferred three times before reaching someone relevant.

• Talent sourcing: Identify passive candidates with specific skills who aren’t actively job hunting, so recruiters can reach qualified people before competitors do.

• Investor due diligence: Evaluate the founding team’s track record and execution experience before committing capital, since team quality often determines whether startups succeed or fail.

• Competitive intelligence: Track competitor hiring patterns to spot market expansion early, as the roles they fill reveal their growth and GTM strategy

• Partnership outreach: Find the right contacts at potential partner companies, whether that’s business development leads or technical decision-makers who evaluate integrations.

• Market research: Analyze talent movement across industries to identify growth trends, declining sectors, and emerging opportunities based on where experienced people are moving.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What Employee Information Can You Find?

Before searching for employees, you need to know what information actually exists in public sources and what doesn’t. Below are some of the categories of employee data:

• Professional background: Current job title and employer, department and seniority level, work history with previous roles and companies, job tenure and start dates, skills and technical expertise, education degrees and certifications.

• Company information about their employer: When you find employees, you also learn about their company like employee count, industry classification, funding stage and investors, growth metrics like headcount changes, technology stack used, and office locations.

• Contact information: Business email addresses when publicly listed, professional profile URLs, and company domain information for email pattern detection.

Personal email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and other private contact details are protected by privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Combining these data types creates precision targeting. Instead of finding “all VPs of Sales,” you can find VPs of Sales at Series B fintech companies with 100-300 employees in San Francisco who joined in the last 12 months and have experience scaling teams from 10 to 50 people.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Methods to Find Employees of a Company

The method you choose depends on how many employees you need to find and how often you need updated information. Here are the main approaches:

Manual Research

Manual research works when you need information on a handful of specific people at target companies.

Company websites: Check “About Us,” “Team,” or “Leadership” pages where tech companies and agencies often list key employees with their titles and backgrounds.

• Professional directories: Platforms where people maintain public profiles showing current employment, job titles, and work history.

• Business directories: Sites like Crunchbase, AngelList, and Wellfound list startup founders and executives, along with funding details and company information.

• GitHub and technical communities: For engineering teams, check who contributes to company repositories or lists the company in their public developer profiles.

• Industry events and conferences: Speaker lists and attendee rosters show current company affiliations and roles.

Pros: Free, accurate when sources are current, works well for targeted executive research.

Cons: Takes 20-30 minutes per person, doesn’t scale past small lists, and data becomes outdated quickly.

When to use: High-value executive outreach, researching specific individuals before meetings, building small lists of 10-15 key contacts.

Search Engine Operators

Search engines help you find employee information across multiple sites at once.

• Find employees at a specific company: site:linkedin.com "Company Name" "job title"

• Find contact pages: site:companyname.com "contact" OR "team" OR "about"

• Find employees by department: "Company Name" AND "VP Marketing" OR "Director of Marketing"

Pros: Free, searches multiple sources simultaneously, good for finding public mentions of people.

Cons: Results vary in quality, requires manual verification, time-intensive for large lists.

When to use: Finding specific individuals when you know their name or approximate title, discovering publicly mentioned employees.

Social Media Platforms

Different platforms serve different purposes for employee discovery.

• Twitter/X: Technical leaders, founders, and executives often list their current company in their bio. Search by company name to find employees who are active publicly.

• GitHub: Developers publicly associate their GitHub accounts with employers. Check organization members and repository contributors.

• Instagram: Check company accounts for tagged employees in posts, and search bios for workplace mentions. Particularly effective for creative industries, marketing roles, and consumer-facing businesses.

Pros: Finds people active in professional communities, reveals thought leaders and technically skilled employees, and often shows personal perspectives on company culture.

Cons: Not everyone maintains active social profiles, data quality is inconsistent, and searches are platform-by-platform.

When to use: Finding technical talent, creative professionals, and a younger workforce.

Email Finder Tools 

These tools help you find business email addresses once you've identified the right person.

• Crustdata Email Enrichment API: Returns verified business email addresses through API integration alongside employment history, skills, and company information in unified JSON responses.

• Hunter.io: Search by company domain to see email patterns and find addresses. Free tier offers 25 searches monthly.

• RocketReach: Database of professional emails and phone numbers. Claims 700M+ profiles with contact details.

• Clearbit Connect: Chrome extension that reveals business emails while browsing professional profiles.

Pros: Fast email discovery, email verification included, useful Chrome extensions for quick lookups.

Cons: Email accuracy varies (typically 50-70%), limited free tiers, doesn't help identify who to contact in the first place.

When to use: After identifying the right person through other methods, when you need verified business email addresses for outreach.

AI Agent-Powered Research

AI agents automate multi-step employee research workflows that previously required hours of manual work. Instead of building complex Boolean search strings, you give natural language instructions: "Find Product Managers in London with fintech experience who posted about payments in the last month." The agent searches professional networks, company websites, and technical communities, then extracts profile data into structured files.

Popular platforms include:

• OpenClaw: Open-source agent that runs on your computer and connects to messaging apps. Searches professional databases, compiles employee lists, and formats results for your CRM.

• Claude Code: AI coding agent that writes and executes scripts to scrape public sources, query APIs, and process employee data automatically.

• Custom GPT agents: AI assistants that combine web search, data processing, and API calls to handle research workflows from a single prompt.

Pros: Automates multi-step workflows, runs continuously to monitor for new profiles, processes hundreds of companies in parallel, integrates with existing tools and databases.

Cons: Requires initial setup and configuration, may need supervision to prevent incorrect data extraction, costs vary based on AI model usage, widespread automated scraping may raise security concerns in enterprise environments.

When to use: Recruiting workflows requiring semantic search beyond exact job titles, complex research combining multiple data sources, recurring tasks like weekly competitive hiring analysis.

Employee Data APIs 

APIs provide programmatic access to databases of professional profiles. Instead of manually searching company by company, you send structured queries and receive current employee data in seconds.

Platforms like Crustdata offer real-time people search APIs that draw from 15+ sources, delivering over 1 billion professional profiles with 95+ data points each. You query by company name, job title, seniority, department, location, or skills, and the system returns matching employees with their work history, education, and current employment status.

• How it works: Send structured queries specifying your criteria. The API searches millions of profiles and returns matching results as JSON data that integrates directly into your CRM or internal tools.

• What you get: Current employment status, work history, education, skills, locations, and business contact details when publicly available.

• Data freshness: Real-time APIs crawl sources at query time for current information. 

Pros: Scales to millions of profiles, fully automated and repeatable, combines unlimited filter criteria, integrates with CRM and internal tools, delivers current data from live crawls.

Cons: Requires technical setup and API integration knowledge.

When to use: Building internal sales tools, powering AI agents, recruiting platforms, competitive intelligence dashboards, and any workflow requiring 1,000+ employee contacts regularly.

Which Method is The Best to Find Company Employees?

Your search volume determines which approach makes sense. Manual research handles targeted searches for a dozen key executives. Search engines and social media work when you know specific names or need technical talent at particular companies. Email finders help after you've identified the right people, but need their contact details.

APIs become necessary when the number of employees reaches hundreds or thousands. If you're building target lists of decision-makers across 200 companies, enriching a CRM with current job titles, or monitoring competitor hiring patterns, manual methods stop working. A sales team prospecting 500 VPs of Marketing across their territory would spend weeks on manual research. An API query returns that list in under a minute with current employment data, work history, and company context already structured for CRM import.

How to Use Employee Data APIs to Find Employees 

Employee data APIs work by querying databases of professional profiles using structured filters. You send a request specifying your criteria and receive matching employee data in seconds.

How API Queries Work

Basic query structure:

json

{

  "filters": [

    {

      "filter_type": "COMPANY_NAME",

      "type": "in",

      "value": ["Target Company"]

    },

    {

      "filter_type": "DEPARTMENT",

      "type": "in",

      "value": ["Sales"]

    }

  ]

}

This returns all Sales employees at "Target Company" with their titles, work history, locations, skills, education, and company context.

Common Search Scenarios

Finding all employees at a specific company: Query by company name or domain to see the full organizational structure from executives to individual contributors. Useful for sales teams mapping out target accounts.

Finding employees by role across companies: Filter by job title, seniority, and industry to build candidate lists. Example: "Engineering Managers" at "Series B" companies in "Software" with "100-500" employees.

Finding employees with specific skills: Combine job title with skills filters. Example: "Data Engineers" with "Python" and "AWS" skills at "Healthcare" companies.

Advanced Filtering Techniques

Handling job title variations:

The same role appears differently across companies. "VP of Engineering" might be "Vice President of Engineering," "Engineering VP," or "Head of Engineering."

Solution: Filter by seniority level + department instead of exact titles. "VP" seniority in "Engineering" department catches all variations.

Targeting high-growth companies:

Combine role filters with growth signals:

• Headcount growth percentage (25%+ in the last 6 months)

• Days since last funding (raised within 90 days)

• Recent hiring velocity

Example: "VP Sales" at companies with "25%+ headcount growth" finds leaders at scaling companies with budget.

Building precise lists:

Real prospecting requires multiple criteria. Finding "CFOs" at "Manufacturing" companies backed by "Private Equity" with "200-2,000" employees targets the exact profile you need.

Platforms like Crustdata combine 60+ people filters with company attributes (size, industry, funding, growth) in single queries.

Data Freshness

APIs handle data two ways:

Cached databases: Monthly updates, instant response times, lower cost. Good for large volume queries where 30-day-old data works.

Real-time crawl: Data pulled at query time, 30-60 second response, current information. Crustdata uses this approach, pulling from 15+ sources when you search rather than returning stale data.

Integration options include:

• Direct CRM push: Send results to Salesforce or HubSpot automatically.

• CSV export: Download for manual review or tools without API connections.

• Webhook alerts: Get notified when employees change jobs or get promoted at companies you're monitoring.

Example Workflow

Goal: Find VPs of Marketing at Series B SaaS companies with 100-500 employees.

Filter by: Job title (VP Marketing, CMO), seniority (VP/C-Level), industry (SaaS), funding (Series B), company size (100-500).

Results: 300-600 marketing leaders with work history, education, skills, tenure, and company growth metrics.

Refine: Only people who joined in the last 12 months or companies that raised funding recently.

Export: Push to CRM, trigger outreach sequences.

This query translates to the following API request:

{

  "filters": [

    {

      "filter_type": "CURRENT_TITLE",

      "type": "in",

      "value": ["VP Marketing", "Vice President of Marketing", "CMO", "Chief Marketing Officer"]

    },

    {

      "filter_type": "SENIORITY_LEVEL",

      "type": "in",

      "value": ["Vice President", "CXO"]

    },

    {

      "filter_type": "INDUSTRY",

      "type": "in",

      "value": ["Computer Software", "SaaS", "Information Technology and Services"]

    },

    {

      "filter_type": "FUNDING_STAGE",

      "type": "in",

      "value": ["Series B"]

    },

    {

      "filter_type": "COMPANY_HEADCOUNT",

      "type": "in",

      "value": ["101-250", "251-500"]

    }

  ],

  "page": 1

}

What took weeks of manual research can be completed in under an hour, with complete, current data on every contact.

Best Practices for Finding Employes

Finding employees of a company becomes more effective when you follow patterns that account for how job titles vary, how quickly data changes, and how to filter without getting overwhelmed by results. These practices help you build accurate lists faster and avoid common mistakes:

• Start broad, then narrow: Begin with department and seniority filters, then add company criteria to reduce volume. Searching for "all Directors in Sales" returns too many results. Adding "at Series B companies with 100-300 employees" creates a manageable list.

• Use multiple title variations: The same role has different titles across companies. Include 5-10 common variations or filter by seniority level instead of exact titles.

• Verify before high-value outreach: APIs provide current data, but double-check employment status for executive contacts before important meetings or partnership discussions.

• Update lists quarterly: B2B contact data decays at 70.3% annually. People change jobs, get promoted, or leave companies, so you should refresh your target lists as often as possible.

• Combine people and company filters: Don't just search by title. "VP Sales at high-growth fintech companies" targets better than "all VP Sales everywhere."

• Set up monitoring for key accounts: Use webhooks or alerts to track when target companies hire new decision-makers or when your champions change jobs.

• Respect data privacy: Only use employee data for legitimate business purposes. Follow GDPR and CCPA requirements. Provide opt-out options in your outreach.

Why Use Crustdata to Find Company Employees

When you need to find employees of a company at scale, Crustdata delivers real-time professional data through APIs built for automation. The platform crawls data from 15+ sources at the moment you search, so employment information reflects current status rather than outdated records.

What Crustdata offers for employee search:

• Real-time data crawling: Query returns current employment information pulled live from 15+ sources including professional profiles, company websites, and public directories at request time.

• 1B+ professional profiles: Global coverage with 95+ datapoints per person including complete work history, education, skills, current roles, locations, and business contact details when publicly available.

• 60+ search filters: Combine job title, seniority, department, skills, location with company attributes like size, industry, funding stage, and growth rate in single queries.

• Webhook monitoring: Track job changes, promotions, and new hires at companies you care about with real-time alerts delivered when changes happen.

• API-first architecture: Integrate directly with CRM systems, recruiting platforms, or internal tools using structured JSON responses built for automation workflows.

Sales teams build decision-maker lists across target accounts in minutes instead of days. Recruiters source candidates with specific skills at companies matching their hiring criteria. Investors evaluate the founding team's backgrounds before meetings.

Ready to automate employee discovery with real-time data? 

Book a demo to see how Crustdata's People Search API works for your workflow.

FAQs

Do Employee Data APIs Include Contact Information Like Emails And Phone Numbers?

Business email addresses appear in API responses when employees list them publicly on professional profiles or company websites. Personal email addresses and phone numbers are restricted by GDPR and CCPA privacy regulations. Most teams use APIs to identify the right people first, then use email pattern detection (firstname.lastname@company.com) or email finder tools to locate contact details separately.

How Current Is Employee Data From APIs?

This depends on whether the API uses cached databases or real-time crawling. Cached databases update monthly or quarterly, meaning data can be 30-90 days old. Real-time APIs like Crustdata crawl sources at the moment you query, returning current employment information. For high-value outreach or recruiting, real-time data matters because people change jobs frequently and outdated information wastes time.

Can APIs Find Employees at Private Companies That Don't Publish Team Information?

APIs source data from public professional profiles, not just company websites. Even if a private company doesn't list employees publicly, individuals often maintain professional profiles showing their current employer and role. APIs aggregate this publicly available information across multiple sources. Coverage varies by company size and industry, but platforms pulling from multiple sources typically have good coverage at mid-size and larger companies.