# Candidate Enrichment

## Refresh your Candidate Database!

**Date:** 12/06/24  
**Time:** 10 min

### Overview

Every recruiter hates that feeling of finding the perfect candidate only to reach out and discover that they just changed jobs last month. It can be just as frustrating to spend hours verifying contact information and work experience when building a high quality candidate list.

In this recipe, you’ll find a quick and easy way to take your existing database of candidates and fill-in missing information with up-to-date data from PDL’s Person Dataset.

### Data Ingredients

**PDL Products**  
- Person Enrichment API  
- Person Data License

**Key Fields**  
- Name  
- Contact Info  
- Work Experience  
- Location  
- Social / Github  
- Skills  
- Certifications

**Inputs**  
- Unique identifying attributes (e.g. email, social URL, phone)

**Outputs**  
- Comprehensive person records

### Directions

**Step 1:** Gather your candidates  
Create a dataset of all the candidates you would like to enrich.

**Step 2:** Access the PDL Person Dataset  
Set up your PDL account and access the Person Dataset through our APIs or bulk data files. For this recipe we recommend using the Person Enrichment API, which automatically handles the matching process in the Step 5 below.

**Step 3:** Define your inputs  
Decide on the identifying information to use for matching (e.g., **social URL, email, phone number**). If lacking specific identifiers, use combinations like **name** with **company, location, or school**.

**Step 4:** (Optional) Specify your outputs  
Define specific information required from the Person Dataset (e.g., personal emails for outreach). If you’re using the Person Enrichment API, you can use the **required** field for this.

**Step 5:** Match your candidates against the Person Dataset  
Use your defined inputs from **Step 3** to find matching records in the Person Dataset. Filter out any records not meeting your required outputs from **Step 4**.

**Step 6:** Append enriched information  
Integrate the enriched data back into your candidate records.

**Step 7:** Test and verify  
Check the enriched dataset for completeness and accuracy. Track match rates and verify the accuracy with spot checks or randomized samples.

### Chef's Recommendations

### When preparing your data

For this recipe, you’ll need to have an existing dataset of candidate profiles, which we will then enrich with PDL’s Person Dataset.

**Existing Dataset of Candidates:**  
This is your existing list of candidates that you have already collected. This could be anything from a simple text document with names and emails up to a full enterprise Applicant Tracking System (and everything in between). The only requirement is that your dataset contains some amount of information for each candidate that can be used for matching.

**PDL Person Dataset:**  
People Data Labs’ flagship person dataset is perfect for enriching candidate profiles. It contains hundreds of millions of professional records from across the world, complete with hundreds of attributes including work and education experience, contact information, skills, certifications and more. This dataset is accessible in a variety of ways, including as an API or a bulk data file.

### Accessing the Person Enrichment API

If you expect to enrich less than ~8,000 candidates per month, then use our self-serve dashboard to set up an API key and purchase credits for the Person Enrichment API (we offer 100 free credits per month to all users).

For larger volumes, speak with a data consultant who can help set up an enterprise account with a lower cost per credit.

### Improving your match rate

Ensure that you are standardizing your inputs before matching against the Person records (i.e. lower-casing and trimming whitespace).

Additionally, if you have set up a lot of required parameters, you may be filtering out a lot of profiles. If your match rates are too low for your goals, we recommend limiting the required fields to just the most important ones.

### Still need help?
- Check out our detailed [code examples](https://docs.peopledatalabs.com/docs/examples-person-enrichment-api)
- Check out our [Help Center](https://support.peopledatalabs.com/)
- Reach out to your customer success representative (enterprise customers)