LinkedIn scraping and extraction

Extraction is the least glamorous step in a prospecting stack and the one that quietly decides the quality of everything downstream. The job is turning a search into a clean file. Three things go wrong, always the same three. Volume: a search above a couple of thousand profiles cannot be exported in one piece, so people slice it by hand and create overlap without noticing. Overlap: two searches that feel different to a human return the same people to a database, and you pay for both. On one of our runs, four searches returned 23,089 rows for 15,363 distinct people, so a third of the spend bought nothing. Deduplication afterwards refunds nothing, because the duplicate was billed the moment it was returned. And field hygiene: emojis in a first name and a job title glued to a surname survive the extraction, travel through the enrichment, and come out in the first line of an email in front of a prospect. Judge a tool here on three behaviours: does it split a large query automatically, does it recognise profiles you already extracted, and does it clean the fields. Prices are per volume of profiles per month, and the ladder usually starts around thirty dollars.