Do recruiters use Core Signal directly?

No. Core Signal is a data source, not an application with a login. A sourcing tool, an internal database, or a workflow platform like Clay integrates its API, and the recruiter works inside that tool instead.

How does Core Signal's pricing work?

Pricing is credit-based, split into Search credits and Collect credits that renew monthly. Per Core Signal, entry API plans start around $49 a month and new accounts get trial credits to test coverage first. Bulk datasets are sold separately on a custom contract.

What is the difference between the API and the datasets?

The API is for live lookups against the database, one record or query at a time. The datasets are the same data delivered as bulk files to your own storage in formats like JSON, CSV or Parquet, which suits teams populating a warehouse rather than querying on demand.

How current is the data, and can I see history?

Records are refreshed on a continuous collection cycle and carry timestamps showing when they were last collected. Core Signal also retains multi-year historical snapshots, so you can look at how a company or workforce appeared at an earlier point rather than only its current state.

Where does the data come from, and is it compliant?

Per Core Signal, it collects only publicly available business data and its processing is aligned with GDPR and CCPA. It is a founding member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative, caps retention at five years from the last collection, and honours access, correction and deletion requests. Check its data-compliance page against your own requirements.

Enrichment - Talent API

Core Signal

Bulk company, employee and job posting records from public web sources

What is Core Signal?

Core Signal collects company, employee, and job posting records from public web sources and makes them available as large structured datasets, delivered as flat files to your storage or queried live through an API. It is not a tool a recruiter logs into; staffing and recruiting agencies and HR tech builders pull the data into their own pipelines to power sourcing tools, enrichment layers, and AI models. The dataset includes multi-year historical snapshots alongside current records, so a team building a talent intelligence product can work with how the data looked at a point in the past, not just how it looks today. Access is through API subscriptions or separately licensed dataset contracts.

Features

What are Core Signal's key features?

Employee API returns structured professional profiles with career history and role data.

Company API delivers firmographic records including headcount, funding, and tech signals.

Jobs API provides freshly collected job posting data for sourcing and market research.

Data is available in three processing tiers: Base, Clean, and Multi-Source.

Use Cases

How do recruiting teams use Core Signal?

A staffing and recruiting agency uses the Jobs API to spot companies posting roles in a target sector, then finds the hiring contact for BD outreach.
An in-house talent team queries the Employee API to map skill and career patterns across a candidate segment before defining search criteria.
An engineering team pipes the Company and Employee APIs into an internal enrichment pipeline to keep candidate and prospect records current.
An AI sourcing agent calls the Jobs API on a schedule, filters for companies entering a hiring surge, and routes matching accounts into an outreach workflow.

Fit

Who is Core Signal best for?

Engineering teams building an enrichment pipeline that needs company and employee data in bulk
Agencies and in-house teams that need workforce history, not only a current snapshot
Not for recruiters wanting a search interface; delivery is API and files only

Pros & Cons

What are Core Signal's pros and cons?

Pros

Broad global coverage of company, employee, and job-posting data (890M+ employee profiles, 75M+ company records per Core Signal).
Flexible delivery: REST API, bulk CSV/JSON, and scheduled file push to fit different pipeline shapes.
Volume-oriented pricing with a free trial, so a build team can test coverage before committing.
Sources only publicly available business data; GDPR and CCPA compliant per Core Signal's data-compliance page.

Cons

Not a recruiter-facing UI; it is a data source that requires engineering effort to turn into a workflow.
Search and Collect credits can consume quickly on large jobs, so per-record cost needs planning at volume.
Data completeness and freshness vary by record and source.

Alternatives

How does Core Signal compare to alternatives?

Feature	Core Signal	CrustData	Fiber.ai
Category	Enrichment - Talent API	Enrichment - Talent API	Enrichment - Talent API
AI-first
API
MCP
GDPR
Best for	Agency, In-House	Agency, In-House	Agency, In-House

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions about Core Signal

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