Help needed: Why does find people return only 389 results from 12,000 companies despite no filters?

Anthony O. · 2026-04-26T01:36:59.137Z

I'm trying to build a "find people" search off of a company table I have. The whole company table has nearly 12,000 companies and I'm trying to just find people at 1,750 of those companies. But when I use the find people functionality and pick my table where the 12,000 companies are, it is only showing 389 people results. I'm seeing that it shows 15 filters on the "companies" tab but I'm not sure what those would be? Can anyone help me figure out how to find more people? I have no other filters on this find people search, FYI.

Help needed: Why does find people return only 389 results from 12,000 companies despite no filters? | Clay

11 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Honourable A.
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Use company LinkedIn URL as the identifier and see if there would be a difference Anthony O.
Anthony O.
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Tried that - no luck. I'm going to go a different route and use the find people waterfall.
Billy P.
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What niche are you in? That affects the best way to gather data Anthony O.
Anthony O.
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For this client I'm looking for Controllers, VPs of Finance, CFOs, etc. in blue collar industries. Building materials suppliers, large scale non-residential construction, etc. I've also noticed when I start a people search from scratch (and don't reference this table) and use filters, the more roles I add, the smaller the list of people gets. That feels like the opposite of what should happen. Feels like it maxes out at 5 roles/titles and then when you add more the number of people in the results starts to go down all the way to zero if you add too many roles.
Billy P.
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(edited)·
Clay's Find People is nice for a start, but the volume is low, and a lot of those people are online enough to get hit up by a lot of salespeople. Especially for blue collar industries, which are less online than, say, SaaS. I'd find a “seed” list from elsewhere, then use Clay to enrich. A lot of the best places to find seed lists are paid, like Apollo.io. I feel like Construction Financial Management Association would be a good place to find the people you’re looking for. You could join and get access to the full membership directory. Or, if you don’t want to pay to join, you could ask your LLM of choice to crawl CFMA branch pages looking for any members it can find It really depends what volume you’re looking for. But finding the right seed list(s) is the real challenge, and imo your best bet is looking outside Clay for that Anthony O.
Anthony O.
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What if I used a waterfall of data providers to look for 2-3 contacts at the accounts I pulled from hubspot and already enriched? For example, I've got about 1,750 really good fit accounts. I'd like to find 2-3 contacts at each of those companies. Wouldn't a waterfall approach within that Clay table be a better appraoch?
Billy P.
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Yeah, that should work. Sorry, I forgot you had the companies already, I was thinking if you wanted to start from scratch.
👍1
Anthony O.
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Any good youtube videos out there on how to setup and customize the find people waterfall? I got it kind of built out but now I want to build some conditional logic where it pulls the first two contacts LI profiles from the waterfall, and if they don't have an LI profile it pulls their full name, etc. etc. Can't seem to find any resources that specifically unpack this functionality. Anything you know of?
Billy P.
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No, but I haven’t watched many YouTube videos about Clay. Usually, when I’m trying to figure out new features, I’m talking to Clay Sculptor and Gemini until I can figure it out
👍1
pradip k.
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I think you should use multiple providers in multiple columns. . I faced the same problem. so i use native as fine people just only one for one column and i use second provider and then third but not in single workflow and then i get multiple contacts from multiple source FYI find people all providers dont have super good filters. and will find junk contacts also you can use claude co-work export that list and ask claude to find ICP's by scraping the data from web ( claude is really good as layer one ( data scraping ) then you run those ICP's in clay to enrich. happy to jump on call if you need more help
Jon F.
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(edited)·
Anthony O. we have a beta product out called person/search for this use case (its an api). https://www.datalegion.ai/docs/api-reference/person-search We as a company are already integrated into clays ecosystem. https://www.clay.com/integrations/data-provider/data-legion

Honourable A.
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Use company LinkedIn URL as the identifier and see if there would be a difference Anthony O.
Anthony O.
·
·
Tried that - no luck. I'm going to go a different route and use the find people waterfall.
Billy P.
·
·
What niche are you in? That affects the best way to gather data Anthony O.
Anthony O.
·
·
For this client I'm looking for Controllers, VPs of Finance, CFOs, etc. in blue collar industries. Building materials suppliers, large scale non-residential construction, etc. I've also noticed when I start a people search from scratch (and don't reference this table) and use filters, the more roles I add, the smaller the list of people gets. That feels like the opposite of what should happen. Feels like it maxes out at 5 roles/titles and then when you add more the number of people in the results starts to go down all the way to zero if you add too many roles.
Billy P.
·
(edited)·
Clay's Find People is nice for a start, but the volume is low, and a lot of those people are online enough to get hit up by a lot of salespeople. Especially for blue collar industries, which are less online than, say, SaaS. I'd find a “seed” list from elsewhere, then use Clay to enrich. A lot of the best places to find seed lists are paid, like Apollo.io. I feel like Construction Financial Management Association would be a good place to find the people you’re looking for. You could join and get access to the full membership directory. Or, if you don’t want to pay to join, you could ask your LLM of choice to crawl CFMA branch pages looking for any members it can find It really depends what volume you’re looking for. But finding the right seed list(s) is the real challenge, and imo your best bet is looking outside Clay for that Anthony O.
Anthony O.
·
·
What if I used a waterfall of data providers to look for 2-3 contacts at the accounts I pulled from hubspot and already enriched? For example, I've got about 1,750 really good fit accounts. I'd like to find 2-3 contacts at each of those companies. Wouldn't a waterfall approach within that Clay table be a better appraoch?
Billy P.
·
·
Yeah, that should work. Sorry, I forgot you had the companies already, I was thinking if you wanted to start from scratch.
👍1
Anthony O.
·
·
Any good youtube videos out there on how to setup and customize the find people waterfall? I got it kind of built out but now I want to build some conditional logic where it pulls the first two contacts LI profiles from the waterfall, and if they don't have an LI profile it pulls their full name, etc. etc. Can't seem to find any resources that specifically unpack this functionality. Anything you know of?
Billy P.
·
·
No, but I haven’t watched many YouTube videos about Clay. Usually, when I’m trying to figure out new features, I’m talking to Clay Sculptor and Gemini until I can figure it out
👍1
pradip k.
·
·
I think you should use multiple providers in multiple columns. . I faced the same problem. so i use native as fine people just only one for one column and i use second provider and then third but not in single workflow and then i get multiple contacts from multiple source FYI find people all providers dont have super good filters. and will find junk contacts also you can use claude co-work export that list and ask claude to find ICP's by scraping the data from web ( claude is really good as layer one ( data scraping ) then you run those ICP's in clay to enrich. happy to jump on call if you need more help
Jon F.
·
(edited)·
Anthony O. we have a beta product out called person/search for this use case (its an api). https://www.datalegion.ai/docs/api-reference/person-search We as a company are already integrated into clays ecosystem. https://www.clay.com/integrations/data-provider/data-legion