Industry filtering
The two meanings of "industry", which filter expresses each, and how to pick valid values so an industry filter never silently matches nothing.
Industry filtering
"Industry" means two different things in people data, and most searches actually want the second one. This page separates the two, shows the filter for each, and covers how to pick valid industry values, including which values are worth showing your users.
Two meanings of "industry"
| Filter | What it matches | Where |
|---|---|---|
industry | The industry on the person's own profile | People search |
linkedinIndustries | The employer's industry, in current LinkedIn industry names | Company search, combined search (companyParams) |
industriesV2 | The employer's industry, in Fiber's broader standard categories | Company search, combined search (companyParams) |
Providers in this space mostly derive industry from the employer. If your audience is "people who work in industry X" (what most industry targeting means), that's an employer-industry search.
The person's own industry
The industry filter on people search matches the industry carried on the
person's profile. It's populated for nearly all profiles today, so an
industry-filtered people search reaches essentially everyone who matches.
Use it when the question is about the person: "people whose profile says healthcare", regardless of where they work.
The employer's industry
For people at companies in an industry, use combined search and put the industry filter on the company side:
{
"companyParams": {
"linkedinIndustries": { "anyOf": ["Banking"] }
},
"profileParams": {
"country3LetterCode": { "anyOf": ["FRA"] },
"jobTitleV3": { "anyOf": [{ "type": "functional", "seniority": ["manager", "director"] }] }
}
}The employer-side filter answers a different question than the person-level one, and it combines with your other company conditions (size, location, funding) in the same query.
Choose between the two employer-side filters:
linkedinIndustriesis precise. Current LinkedIn industry names, hundreds of them. One broad concept often spans several names: retail includes Retail, Retail Groceries, Online and Mail Order Retail, Retail Apparel and Fashion and more. Send all that apply.industriesV2is broader. Fiber's standardized categories group those names, so one value covers the whole concept. Start here, narrow withlinkedinIndustriesif you need precision.
Picking valid values
Get industry names from the industries list
(GET /v1/enums/industries, free). It returns every valid name for all
three lists, plus companyCounts, the number of companies behind each
value.
A linkedinIndustries value must match exactly. A misspelled or retired
name (for example the older "Computer Software" instead of "Software
Development") returns zero results with no error or warning. Build
your lists from the industries list, never from memory.
Check companyCounts before you expose a value in your own filter UI.
The enum list is complete, but some values have only a handful of companies
behind them; a filter option with eleven matching companies is a no-op for
your users and generates support tickets. Hide values whose count is too
small to matter for your audience, and show the count alongside each option
so users can see what they're selecting.
Which one when
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| People at companies in an industry (the common case) | Combined search, industriesV2 or linkedinIndustries on companyParams |
| Companies in an industry | Company search, same filters |
| People by the industry on their own profile | People search, industry |
| A broad category, fast | industriesV2 |
| Exact industry names | linkedinIndustries, values from the industries list |
Related
- Getting accurate results from search — filter semantics and worked examples
- Typeaheads — resolve names to exact values
- Search counts — exact vs estimated numbers
- Search — filters, ordering, pagination
Search counts
Count matching companies and people before you pull a single result — what's exact, what's estimated, and the two caveats that matter when a count feeds a report or a benchmark.
Migrating from another data provider
Translation tables for the filter vocabularies that differ between providers (departments, seniority levels, job-title matching), so a search means the same thing here as it did there.