People & referrers
Finding the humans who could refer you — without your accounts.
The product is a named person who works there now and could refer you. Finding them — without ever logging into your own accounts — is the heart of ZoNuLy, which is why referral work gets most of every cycle.
The goal per company#
Three ready referrers, at least one with a usable address. “Ready” means verified-current or likely-current, a person rather than an inbox, not on the do-not-contact list, and with some identity (name, GitHub or LinkedIn).
Where people are found#
- Founders and team pagesYC's page lists active founders; the company's own team and About pages name people next to their roles — the strongest evidence of all.
- One Exa people searchA single metered search per company for current profiles, inside a daily reserve.
- Public LinkedIn, keylessSearch-result titles like “Name – Engineer at Company”, scoped to the company's city. Profiles are never fetched while logged in.
- GitHubMembers of the company's GitHub organisation and recent committers to its repositories — engineers by definition, often with a commit address.
- Public mentionsTalks, podcasts and blog bylines that name someone at the company.
- Apify People tabFor high-paying companies still short of referrers: the company's LinkedIn People tab bought from Apify by its own job every 30 minutes — up to three companies a run, 25 people each, in the company's city — inside the daily cap of $0.60 (the $19 Starter credit spread over a month).
The rules#
City lock#
For a Bengaluru company only people based in Bengaluruare kept; for Hyderabad, only Hyderabad. Location means the location on their own profile — never a college, never a search snippet. A person with no known location is dropped under the lock. Apify receives the city as a server-side filter, so you don't pay for people in other countries.
Employment must be current#
A public profile that lists the company with no end date is verified-current; with an end date, the person is former and dropped. A commit alone is not employment. Referrers are re-confirmed after 90 days and downgraded if the evidence has gone.
Ranked by who can actually refer#
| Rank | Role class |
|---|---|
| 1 | Senior, staff, lead or founding engineer |
| 2 | Software engineer, SDE 1–3 |
| 3 | Founder, CTO, co-founder |
| 4 | Engineering manager |
| 5 | Technical recruiter / tech HR |
| 6 | General HR / talent |
| 9 | Anyone else — never asked first |
Since 23 Oct 2026 the tech team ranks first: a referral from an engineer on the team you would join carries more than one from a founder's inbox. The order lives in targeting.people.roles in config.yaml.
The actors layer#
jobhunter/actors/ is “our own Apify”: small programs (actors) with a run ledger, datasets, a page cache, and per-host politeness. LinkedIn is read only as a logged-out guest, at most one request every 20–45 seconds, and a circuit breaker stops every actor on a host the moment it sees a login wall, status 999 or 429.
python scripts/run.py actor people 2802 --linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/skylotech \
--source apify --apify-max 25 --title engineerResults are saved as contacts through the guardrails by default and appear on the company page and on Leads. Use --no-save to only look.