Find Company Employees Through Website Changes
Identify Changes in Website (including when employees were hired or left the company)
Changes in company websites can identify when employees were hired or left the company. The following tools will provide that information
1 –
https://www.aihitdata.com
– This tool tracks and parses data from company websites, registration, Linkedin accounts for employees, and possibly more. Notably, this tool also identifies changes in company websites, such as when new employees profiles or photos are posted on the website. AIHITdata also identifies when employees are taken down from the website.
2 – The WayBack Machine and other internet archives – The WayBack Machine has an archive of copies of websites over time. There are other similar tools. Another post provides information about this. See:
3 – The Wayback MAchine also has a “Changes” feature that tells you when changes happened in a website over time – see previous post:
WayBack Machine’s “Changes” Feature
4 – \https://carbondate.cs.odu.edu – The tool’s main purpose is to try to figure out when a website was created. But I use it to find if a website exists in different internet archives. If the tool finds your website in an archive, it will list out a URL that brings you to that archive’s earliest version of your website.
Tracking Photos – Using Carbon 14 Python script
The Carbon 14 script by Nixintel (
https://nixintel.info/
) will look at a webpage and determine when each photo was uploaded to the site.
I use this to figure out when employees started working at a company. I look at employee profiles on a website and find when the profile photo was uploaded. I am assuming the connection between profile and employment.
This also gives me some guidance on what to seek out in the Internet Archive. I will look for the archive of a website before and after the date the photo was uploaded. This should confirm my expectations and also show the previous employee in the same position.
More Employees
A company’s website will often how a list or profiles of employees and/or leadership, or boards.
Usually if you hover your mouse over one of the photos some additional details will show up, like title or email. This can be frustrating if you want to scrape all of the profiles but you need to hover your mouse over every single one to get those details.
A previous post addressed how to web scrape a page like that, including scraping all of the profiles and the details that show up when hovering your mouse. See the post:
How to Web Scrape Corporate Profiles with Python
Carbon 14
1 – Log into Github and then in a second tab log into Gitpod, then in a third tab paste and go to:
gitpod.io/#https://github.com/Lazza/Carbon14
2 – Hit continue and once a new “workspace” has opened up, type:
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
3 – type the following, but where it lists “examplewebsite.com” you put in the url for the specific page in the website that you want to search
python carbon14.py
(ex. “python carbon14.py
https://www.examplewebsite.com”
😉
3 – The output will show when each photo on the page was uploaded.
If you used the webpage with corporate profiles you will see an output that looks like this:
The output is a list of information on each photo, including the date uploaded and the photo URL. Each employee’s name will often be part of the URL to their profile photo. And of course you can also click on the URL to open the photo.