Clay Icon
Join the Community
02 Support

Targeting Engineering Function in Clay's People Search: Filtering for Builders, not Sellers or Recruiters

Avatar of Ted G.Ted G.
·
·

Anybody know how to approximate the Sales Navigator "function" role filter in Clay's People Search options to target folks that serve the "engineering" function at a company? Right now, I am using the "Find People using LinkedIn" option in Clay, which seems to only allows me to filter for job title keywords. I have been guessing at the right mix of keywords to include/exclude to produce a reliable list, but the results are still full of false positives (people who SELL software or RECRUIT engineers, but do not BUILD software). Am I missing something?

9 comments

  • Avatar of Tyler C.
    Tyler C.
    ·
    ·

    Hey Ted. You can try adding some exclusion keywords as well. For example exclude “sales” and “recruiting” and “recruiters”. Check the results and see if there’s a common theme of people you don’t want, rinse and repeat till it’s polished enough.

    ✨1
  • Avatar of Clay T.
    Clay T.
    APP
    ·
    ·

    Hey Ted! Yep, as Tyler mentions, that would be the best way to refine parameters with that feature. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the same granularity or fuzzy kind of search that LinkedIn offers, but those are some of the tradeoffs since these LI features we have don't use your active session or cookies to scrape for records.

  • Avatar of Clay T.
    Clay T.
    APP
    ·
    ·

    The alternative is if you find running a search directly on LinkedIn much more precise, then you could use scraping tools to collect them and then import them into Clay for further enrichment.

  • Avatar of Ted G.
    Ted G.
    ·
    ·

    Thanks for the thoughtful response, Arturo O.. I hadn't thought of going from Sales Nav to Clay for the initial list. Do you know of any "scraping tools" that could facilitate this?

  • Avatar of Clay T.
    Clay T.
    APP
    ·
    ·

    Yes, the most common ones are Phantombuster but I think Apify may also have something for that (not sure)

  • Avatar of Clay T.
    Clay T.
    APP
    ·
    ·

    We're updating our own extension very soon though, so maybe you'll be able to keep it within Clay anyway :)... cc Osman S. for visibility

    👀1
    👍1
  • Avatar of Ted G.
    Ted G.
    ·
    ·

    Arturo O. Is it possible to edit a people search column on a company table after that search has already been run once?

  • Avatar of Clay T.
    Clay T.
    APP
    ·
    ·

    Hey Ted, not yet but has been discussed with the team. Hopefully we'll have updates around this soon