To get verified contact details from a professional profile, first match the person and employer, then find a candidate address or phone number, and finally validate the channel you plan to use. Keep those results separate. A correct profile match does not verify a mailbox, and an email result does not verify a phone number.
This guide is for operators starting with a profile URL. For a batch beginning with names and company domains, use the CSV enrichment walkthrough. For product capabilities, see work emails and phone numbers.
Establish identity before retrieving contact data
Preserve the original profile URL and your source record ID. Normalize the URL only after verifying which parts identify the profile. Remove tracking parameters when appropriate, but do not substitute a company page for a person profile or infer identity from a display name alone.
Compare the candidate's name, company and role with the source evidence. When the person recently changed jobs, decide whether the job requires their current employer or the employer associated with an earlier event. A founder's old company domain may no longer be a useful work-email input.
| Input condition | Next action |
|---|---|
| Person profile and employer agree | Search for the required contact channel |
| Several people share the same name | Add company, role or location evidence |
| Profile and supplied employer conflict | Hold the row and resolve the employment context |
| Only a company page is available | Identify the intended person before contact enrichment |
| No defensible match | Return unresolved; do not fabricate a contact |
Choose the lookup that matches the job
A person search finds candidates; an enrichment call retrieves additional information for a matched person. Apollo documents People Search separately from People Enrichment. Inspect the current endpoint and access requirements before assuming a search response includes usable email and phone data.
In Deepline, start from the integration catalog or search the current tools. Ask the agent to show the chosen input contract, the identity fields it will use, the output fields it expects and the stopping rule. Use only providers and sources you are authorized to access.
For a founder-contact workflow, confirm the founder's identity and current company first. A public company website can help establish context, but guessing an address from a name pattern is not verification. Do not publish a person's contact details as part of a content example.
Verify email and phone independently
Apply your email verification policy to a candidate email. Preserve the raw provider status, verification time and any catch-all or unknown result.
For phone data, record the returned number, country context, provider and observation time. Number formatting alone does not establish ownership, reachability or whether it is a mobile number. Retain the provider's evidence for those attributes and label missing evidence as unknown. Use the phone enrichment workflow to define channel-specific acceptance.
One lookup may return both channels, but the acceptance decision still belongs to each field. Do not let a verified email cause an unverified phone number to inherit a verified label.
Worked match: a job change invalidates one field
Suppose a fictional source record identifies Alex Example at Example Labs. A new profile observation places Alex at Example Systems, while a contact provider returns a work email associated with Example Labs and a phone number with no ownership evidence.
The task is to reach Alex in their current role. Here is the resulting decision:
| Field | Evidence in this example | Disposition |
|---|---|---|
| Person | Same profile identifier and name | Person matched |
| Employer | New observation conflicts with source record | Update proposed; retain both observations |
| Work email | Mailbox check passes, but domain belongs to former employer | Hold; find a current-employer candidate |
| Phone | Number returned without ownership evidence | Unknown ownership; exclude from automatic use |
A mailbox check cannot repair an employment mismatch. Another successful mailbox check on the same old address adds no evidence about the current role. Resolve the employer, then request a new email candidate using the matched profile and current company context.
If the job instead concerns a historical event at Example Labs, retain that event association separately. Do not overwrite the historical company just because the person's current employer changed.
Count channel outcomes separately
For a hypothetical sample of 20 profiles, suppose 15 identities match, 9 of those have accepted email results, 4 have accepted phone results, and 2 have both. Report 9/20 email coverage, 4/20 phone coverage, and 2/20 both-channel coverage. There are 11 profiles with at least one accepted channel: 9 + 4 − 2. Adding email and phone counts without removing their overlap would overstate coverage.
Keep the five unresolved identities outside the accepted channel totals even if a provider returned populated fields. These numbers illustrate the calculation; they are not Deepline or vendor benchmarks.
Pilot before scaling to a list
Ask your agent to process a small authorized sample that includes an unambiguous match, a common name, a job change, an unresolved profile and an incomplete provider response. Confirm that unknown fields remain unknown and that conflicting identities cannot pass automatically.
Then measure accepted results per required channel. A filled-cell percentage can hide wrong-person matches and unverified numbers. Review errors separately from no-match results so a provider outage does not look like poor coverage.
Once the input and acceptance policy are settled, use the waterfall enrichment guide for a repeatable execution pattern. An individual maintained Play uses its declared stages; the wider integration catalog is not a promise that every provider is called.
Questions operators ask
Can I get emails and phone numbers in one lookup?
Some enrichment contracts return both. Check the actual contract and access level, then evaluate each returned channel independently.
Does a matching LinkedIn URL prove an email is current?
No. It supports person identity. Current employment and mailbox evidence still need to be checked.
What should happen when no verified contact is found?
Return an explicit unresolved or held state with a reason. A missing result is more useful than a fabricated address that looks complete.
Sources
Apollo's People Search and People Enrichment documentation were checked September 14, 2026. The identity policy, table and pilot are proposed operating methods. Begin with the Deepline quickstart to inspect supported tools before execution.