Head Count Growth Rate

Give it a company’s LinkedIn page URL, get back how headcount has moved over time.

What it does

• Tracks the growth rate of a company’s employee headcount over time.
• Returns a time-series trend, not a single number.
• Takes the company’s LinkedIn page URL as the identifier.
• For a point-in-time count — total or by department — use headcount_by_department instead. Same 2-credit price, different question.

Growth is a buying signal. A company that added 40% headcount this year has new teams, new tools and new budget. A company that shrank does not.

Use cases

• Prioritise accounts that are scaling. A company that grew 40% this year is buying tools; a flat one is defending a budget.
• Rank a static account list. Same industry and size, very different trajectories — the trend is what breaks the tie.
• Catch a downturn before it costs you. Shrinking headcount on a customer account is an early renewal-risk flag.
• Justify the timing in your opener. Growth you can point to is a concrete reason for the conversation to happen now.

How to use it

How has headcount changed over time at linkedin.com/company/stripe?

Get the headcount growth rate for these 30 companies and sort them fastest
growing to slowest. Report credits used.

For each, tell me both the current headcount and the trend. I want companies
that are mid-sized AND growing, not just large.

Example prompts

Best prompting practices

• Use trend words. “Over time”, “growth rate”, “trend” route to this tool. “How many” routes to headcount_by_department.
• Filter at search time when you can. find_companies has min_headcount_growth_percent_1m/_3m/_6m/_12m built in. Returning 50 companies from that search is 30 credits; 50 separate lookups here is 100.
• Prefer the LinkedIn URL or id over the name. Names are ambiguous across subsidiaries and regions.
• Say which window you care about. “Six-month and twelve-month growth, as numbers” — a client asked simply whether a company is “growing” will pick a window for you and it may not be the one your ICP is built on.
• Read direction, not just magnitude. Flat is a different conversation from declining. Ask your client to state which.
• Ask for a table you can threshold. Company, current headcount, growth by window, direction. A paragraph per account cannot be sorted into a shortlist.
• Shortlist before you run it. 2 credits an account means a 200-row list is 400 credits for a signal that only changes the top slice.
• Cap the batch. “Stop after 30 and report credits used.”

Output

{
  "identifier": "linkedin.com/company/stripe",
  "growth_rate": [
    { "period": "6m", "percent": 12.4 },
    { "period": "12m", "percent": 23.1 }
  ]
}

Credits and limits

2 credits per call, flat. Run check_credits (free) before a large batch.

Parameters

Related tools

Next steps

• All MCP tools — the full catalogue with credit costs
• Signals & ABM — workflows that turn growth signals into outreach triggers

Keep learning

Two courses take these tools past the reference page — clustered by GTM job, then chained into workflows.