How to Use the LinkedIn Recruiter Profile Scraper

Before you start

• This Phantom is designed for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite.
  → If you want to extract profiles from LinkedIn’s regular site, use the LinkedIn Profile Scraper.
  → For Sales Navigator profiles, use the Sales Navigator Profile Scraper.
• Awareness of LinkedIn’s safety limits:
  • To automate safely, extract no more than 150 profiles per day, spread across multiple launches during office hours.
  • If you enable email discovery, cut this number in half, since the Phantom will perform additional page visits.

Step 1: Connect your LinkedIn account

To let the Phantom act on your behalf:

1. Install the PhantomBuster browser extension and connect your LinkedIn session in one click.
2. If you’re not using Chrome or Firefox, you can retrieve your session cookie manually (see our cookie guide).

Check your browser user agent
Make sure your browser is up to date before connecting your account.
→ If your Chrome or Firefox version is outdated, your session cookie may expire much more quickly, and you’ll need to reconnect often.

Step 2: Provide the Recruiter profile URLs

Tell the Phantom which LinkedIn Recruiter profiles you want to extract. You can provide:

1. A URL:
   • Paste a single LinkedIn Recruiter profile URL.
   • Provide a Google Sheet with LinkedIn Recruiter profile URLs (make sure it’s shared with “Anyone with the link”).

   • Upload a CSV file with LinkedIn Recruiter profile URLs (make sure it’s publicly accessible, and note that CSV upload is only available on paid plans).

     → If you’re using a spreadsheet, the Phantom defaults to the first column (A). To use a different column, enter the column’s header name in the field “Name of column containing profile URLs.”

2. My Phantoms:
   Use results from another Phantom as input.

Step 3: Choose how many profiles to scrape per launch

• Number of profiles to scrape per launch (optional):
  • Default = 10.
  • We recommend keeping this at 10 per run to stay safe.

Advanced settings (dropdown in setup)

Use these only if you need extra data or LinkedIn is being restrictive:

• Simulate LinkedIn’s dwell time (~1 min per profile):
  → Slows the Phantom down to look more human.
• Save profile pictures as JPEG:
  → Downloads each profile photo (max 1000 files per ZIP file). Useful if you want to build a visual lead database or sync images into your CRM.
• Extract profile interests (JSON only):
  → Adds groups, companies, and schools followed by the person. Helps you personalize outreach (“I saw you also follow X company…”).
• Extract accomplishments (JSON only):
  → Courses, projects, languages, publications. Great for finding common ground in outreach (same course, shared language).
• Extract recommendations (JSON only):
  → Both given and received recommendations. Lets you see what colleagues say about them, useful for recruiting or trust-building.
• Extract licenses & certifications (JSON only):
  → Pulls certifications from their profile. Helpful for filtering candidates by technical skills (AWS, Salesforce, HubSpot certs).
• Keep only current results (JSON only):
  → Keeps your results file clean by overwriting old data each launch. Best if you only care about the latest version of profiles, not a historical log.

Step 4: Enrich your leads with professional emails (optional)

You can choose to add verified professional email addresses to each LinkedIn profile.

Not every profile will return an email address. The match rate depends on the data available, so the number of verified emails may be lower than your credits used.

1. Click on the “Select your email discovery service” dropdown.
2. Choose one of the following options:
   • PhantomBuster credits (default option)
     • Each plan includes monthly email discovery credits.
     • 1 credit = 1 attempt to find and verify an email for one profile.
     • Credits reset monthly.
   • Third-party services
     • Connect your own account by entering your API key for:
       • Dropcontact.io
       • Hunter.io
       • Snov.io

Enabling email discovery means the Phantom will spend more time on each profile, since it needs to process both the message and the email lookup. This increases execution time per launch.

Tip for safe use
When using email discovery, process about half of the default daily recommendation for your Phantom. This reduces the risk of hitting LinkedIn’s rate limits.
Example: with the LinkedIn Profile Visitor Phantom, aim for ~40 profiles per day instead of the default 80.

Step 5: Select launch frequency

Choose how often the Phantom should run:

1. Launch manually: Start the Phantom yourself whenever you need.
2. Launch once at a specific time: schedule a one-time run at a set date and time.
3. Launch repeatedly: schedule regular runs (e.g. once per day, several times during working hours).
4. Launch after another Phantom: chain automations together so this Phantom starts right after another finishes.
5. Advanced scheduling: customize the exact minutes, hours, days, or months when the Phantom should run.

→ For a complete walkthrough of scheduling options, see our guide to scheduling Phantoms automatically.

Step 6 (Optional): Advanced settings

Advanced settings are available if you want to fine-tune how your Phantom runs, but by default they’re already optimized for most use cases.

We recommend leaving them as they are unless a guide specifically instructs you to change something.

→ For a detailed overview of all advanced options (like execution limits, retries, email notifications, proxies, webhooks, and file management), see our Advanced settings guide.

Launch and results

When you’re ready:

1. Click Launch to start your Phantom.
2. Once it finishes, open the Results tab in the Phantom console to see the data collected.
3. Download your results as a CSV or JSON file, or view them as a dynamic list on the LinkedIn Leads page.

→ To learn how to export your data to Google Sheets, integrate with other tools, or reuse it in more automations, check our Access and Export your Phantom Results guide.

Export and input limits on the Free plan
If you’re on the Free plan or Free trial, some features are limited:
- CSV exports include only the first 10 rows of results.
- CSV download links (for dynamic viewing in Google Sheets or integrations) are not available.
- JSON exports are not available.
- CSV upload as an input method is not supported.
To unlock all features, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

What you give (Input) and What you get (Output)

This section gives you a detailed breakdown of everything you need to provide to run this Phantom, and everything you’ll receive once it completes.

What you give (Input)

What you get (Output)

Tips and troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Using a private Google Sheet → make sure it’s shared with “Anyone with the link.”
• Exceeding daily limits, which may force frequent session cookie resets.
• Expecting more than 1000 photos or advanced fields unless using JSON format.
• Expecting full data in CSV files → the CSV output only includes limited profile details (e.g. the first two job experiences and education entries). To access all scraped data (such as full career history, endorsements, etc.), download the JSON results, convert them to CSV with a JSON-to-CSV tool, and open the converted file.
  → If you want to avoid accumulating multiple runs and only keep the latest complete dataset, enable “Keep only current results in JSON.”

If you run into issues

• Check how to troubleshoot your Phantom using Logs.
• Browse the Fix Issues & Troubleshoot Errors section for solutions to common problems.
• Review our Automation Rate Limits by Platform guide.
• Check our Best Practices for Social Media Automation guide.

Suggested automations

• AI Profile Enricher → enrich scraped profiles with additional data or generate insights for targeting.
• LinkedIn Outreach → contact scraped leads with personalized messages, manage replies in a dashboard, and set automated follow-ups.