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Issues with Clay AI: Incorrect Job Role Prioritization & Duplicates | Clay

Issues with Clay AI: Incorrect Job Role Prioritization & Duplicates

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I've given the prompt very specifically yet the Clay AI still keep returning back irrelevant info. I've asked Clay to search Company's employees data base from Company LinkedIn Page, and return back relevant hiring manager from Finance Hierarchy that be suitable for the open job. The prompt specifically says that first search for finance related Snr professionals, if you can't find it only then find operations director etc etc. Additionally, there multiple jobs for a single company and I've asked to not repeat the same people but it is still repeating same people. Issues:

There are people from finance, but clay is only giving back people from operations. Not focusing first on the priority people.
Giving duplicate people when I've asked to not repeat people for same company for a different job.
I've a find contact column and cuz it doesn't always give back all contacts so I asked AI to first search snr finance professionals from the contacts column first, if not found then search company's linkedin page. It wasn't giving proper results so I changed it to only search for Company's page. Can you help with the proper prompt that it first search from contacts column if not found then move to searching from web on company's linkedin page.
Just to make updates, it's credits wastage and its clay which is giving incorrect results only for some rows. not for all.

Here is my Clay table: https://app.clay.com/workspaces/425370/workbooks/wb_0swctszrztdiBaGYY3n/tables/t_0swctszC6XThop2F8cu/views/gv_0swctt0EWdCndRNXHvk

15 comments

Channeled
APP
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Clay AI’s behavior may be due to how your workflow and prompts are set up: ** Conditional Runs: To ensure finance-related senior professionals are prioritized, use conditional runs (waterfalls) in your workflow. This setup allows Clay to search for finance leaders first, and only if none are found, move to operations or other roles. Without this, Clay may not follow your intended priority order and could return operations professionals even when finance candidates exist . ** Deduplication: If you’re seeing duplicate people for multiple jobs at the same company, make sure to use Clay’s deduplication features. You can normalize and deduplicate lists within your table to ensure each person appears only once per company/job combination . ** *Filtering and Mapping: Use job title filters and persona mapping to target only relevant finance-related senior professionals. This helps refine your search and avoid irrelevant matches , . Review your workflow to confirm these features are properly configured. If you need further help, you can request human assistance by clicking on "Talk to a person."
Sources: AI Formulas + Conditional Runs [Clay 101] - Clay University Map Job Title to Persona with Clay Find People [Clay 101] - Clay University Normalize and Deduplicate a List with Clay
Noor S.
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https://app.clay.com/workspaces/425370/workbooks/wb_0swctszrztdiBaGYY3n/tables/t_0swctszC6XThop2F8cu/views/gv_0swctt0EWdCndRNXHvk
Bo (.
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Hey, Thanks for sharing all the details—that’s super helpful. A few things are likely affecting the output you’re getting from Clay AI: 1. Prompt complexity: The instructions you’re using are solid, but with this many layers, the AI can start to miss the priority rules—especially around fallback roles or duplication. 2. Too many fields in the schema: If you’re using a wide output schema (e.g., 15+ fields across 3 contacts), the AI can struggle to return consistent, accurate data. That also increases the chance of hallucinations or skipping priority logic. 3. Multiple fills in a single table: When using more than 5 fills, performance tends to degrade, especially if each prompt is highly specific and layered like yours Here’s what you can do to improve this: ** Simplify the output schema: Try reducing it to just the essentials. Example Return the full name, job title and linkedin url of all contact found. ** Use “Generate from Prompt” under JSON Schema: This helps Clay better structure the response to match your intent without overwhelming the model. ** Break it down: If you’re running this across multiple jobs per company, you might get better results by splitting jobs into separate prompts or columns and limiting each prompt to return only one unique contact per job. ** *Use Find People Search first then do a lookup to the people table and check who wasn't returned then use Claygent for finding the rest. The find people search can be run at a row level with dynamic values too if you add it from the enrichement pannel > save in this table instead of a new table Let me know if you’d like help simplifying the setup—we can walk through one example together.
Noor S.
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I've already done that
Bo (.
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Got it — which steps did you follow, and where exactly is it breaking? Is there a specific part of the setup that’s not behaving as expected, or was the Find People step not helpful? Let me know so I can dig in.
Noor S.
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find jobs, mark relevant as true and not relevant as false, then find contacts in relevant companies, then ask AI to find three relevant people who would be possible hiring managers (not people from HR or talent)
Noor S.
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mark relevant as true and not relevant as false is also not correctly marking companies
Noor S.
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there are two tables: Finance: https://app.clay.com/workspaces/425370/workbooks/wb_0swctszrztdiBaGYY3n/tables/t_0swctszC6XThop2F8cu/views/gv_0swctt0EWdCndRNXHvk Accounting: https://app.clay.com/workspaces/425370/workbooks/wb_0swdjpmXDNX2MtwSYxH/tables/t_0swdjpmu2FS2Hh8UCUC/views/gv_0swdjpmckKyM7YuKS7t
Noor S.
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Same company identified as true and false both.
Bo (.
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I recorded this walkthrough video showing exactly how to set this up: https://cln.sh/HBqGjZmm Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!
Noor S.
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Thanks but my table is about the open jobs in Atlanta and need to find three relevant relevant hiring managers.
Noor S.
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per job
Noor S.
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before that i need to make sure that the company the job has posted is relevant to us.
Noor S.
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you haven't even responded properly to the last msg
Bo (.
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Hey, sorry about that — just wanted to check if you saw my last message. Here’s what I shared: Start by qualifying the company with an AI agent to make sure it’s relevant. Then, use the Find People search to pull in potential hiring managers, and refine the results using AI to avoid any hallucinations. Let me know if you want help setting this up or if anything was unclear.