People and company data to find the talent others miss

A people data API gives you structured details about a person, like their current role, employer, location, and work history, from a single request. Recruiting teams plug it into their sourcing tools so they can find and qualify candidates without copying details out of browser tabs. Exa's Search API draws on more than 1B public profiles and the wider web, and returns each person's profile details with a link to the page they came from.

With Exa's Search API, you describe the person you're looking for in a sentence, such as “backend engineers in Austin who have worked on payments infrastructure.” Exa matches on what you mean, not just the words you typed, so you get profiles and personal pages that fit even when they're worded differently.

Yes. Exa's Search API returns public profiles and personal sites from Exa's own index, so there are no crawlers to maintain or proxies to rotate. You get the URLs back along with the page text, and your product can parse or store them however it needs.

An enrichment API takes what you already know about a candidate, like a name and a company, and fills in the rest: past employers, education, skills, talks they've given, or things they've written. With Exa's Agent API, you pass in the candidate and the fields you need. It researches the web and returns each field as structured data with its source, ready to write back to your ATS or recruiting CRM.

Most teams run a small service between sourcing and their ATS. It sends a role description to Exa's Search API, takes the candidates that come back, and adds them to the ATS as new prospects through the ATS's own API. Exa responds in JSON, so matching results to candidate records takes very little code.

Keyword search only works when the exact title or skill appears on the page. The same job gets described a dozen different ways across résumés and bios, so a strict keyword match misses most of the right people. Exa's Search API uses embeddings to match on meaning. It's also built to be called by AI agents, so it slots easily into an LLM-powered sourcing workflow.

A crawling API works when you already know which pages you want. In people search you usually don't, so you first need a way to find the right pages. Exa handles both steps: the Search API finds the relevant pages, and the Contents API returns their full text.

Start with twenty real role descriptions and run each one through every API you're evaluating, including Exa's Search API. Have a recruiter grade the top ten results for each query: is the person real, are they currently relevant, and are they a good fit for the role? Then look at rate limits, and check whether you get the full page text back or just a link.

Use Exa's Agent API to search and map out talent pools, for example by building a list of engineers with a particular specialty at companies in one city. Because Exa searches the public web, you can also pick up signals a database won't have. Examples include GitHub repositories that show an engineer's hands-on expertise, podcast appearances where a leader explains how they built and scaled a team, or a recent conference talk.

Instead of running searches one at a time, describe the people you want once with Exa's Agent API and get back a single list you can filter and review. It builds the list from open-ended criteria and enriches each person with the fields you ask for, with sources cited. If you'd rather not write code, Exa Websets builds the same kind of list in the dashboard and checks every person against your criteria.