Hi Pierre! Happy to provide some context! So Clay does not receive data directly from LinkedIn, but rather through third party data providers that scrape LinkedIn. This is because Sales Nav technology is proprietary to LinkedIn. You are correct that because of these limitations, people data quality results may appear better in Sales Nav rather than Clay.
Results from the people search typically get impacted by the following instances:
1. Inputting semantic search parameter instead of syntactic search: A limited set of job title keywords are applied to the role being targeted. Our search algorithms are based on syntactic search which means you must put every variation of the keywords you're looking for (ie CEO and Chief Executive Officer). When this happens, some matching profiles may be missed because they were not included in the search query. Sales Nav is able to do semantic search which is also helpful.
2. Mapping the wrong inputs in the people filters. For example, not mapping LinkedIn urls from the company table to run the search.
3. Search limits applied to the people search. This reduces the number of records that can be imported from a search.
4. Private profiles: Our data providers use a multitude of ways to access people and company data. For the most part though, we don't use your cookie/login data. This means that we could miss some information here and there, especially if there are privacy restrictions in place for certain profiles. This would mean that your logged in profile has access to it, but our data providers may not. Sales Nav has access to private profiles which is also why you might find better data quality results here.
All this being said, we're continuously working on improving our search algorithm/building the best growth tool possible and are always looking for feedback! If you have specific examples of the differences between your search results, please do share and I'd be more than happy to pass your feedback along to our engineering team.
Hope that helps!
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