Home

Clay Announcements
Clay Support
Discuss Anything
Feedback & Requests
GTM Career Advice
Introduce Yourself
Member Spotlight
Share Content and Events
Share Full-time Jobs
Share Part Time Jobs
Share Tables, Tools, and Workflows

Community Guidelines

Explore Events
Clay Cup

Powered by Tightknit

Understanding Exclusion Logic in Prospect Lists | Clay

Understanding Exclusion Logic in Prospect Lists

·Jan 06, 2026 02:40 AM·

I've been building prospect lists and noticed unexpected behavior with exclusions. I had "Recruit" in my "Job Titel contains" exclusion list, but results still included titles like "Operations / Recruitment." A few questions to understand how this works:

1.
Do exclusions use substring matching like "Contains" does for includes? Or are exclusions exact word matching?
2.
If exact word matching, do I need to list all variants separately? (e.g., "Recruit", "Recruiter", "Recruiting", "Recruitment")
3.
What's the order of operations? Does the system first match on includes, then filter by excludes? Or something else?
4.
Do special characters or slashes affect matching? For example, would "Recruitment" as an exclusion catch a title formatted as "Operations / Recruitment"?
5.
Is there documentation on exclusion logic specifically? I found docs on the three include operators (Is similar to, Contains, Is exactly) but nothing on how exclusions work.

8 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Clay Support
APP
·
·
Based on our comparison operators, exclusions in Clay use substring matching, just like the "Contains" operator for includes. [1]
The "Does Not Contain" operator excludes records that contain the specified substring anywhere within the field. [2] So if you exclude "Recruit", it should catch titles like "Operations / Recruitment" since "Recruit" is contained within "Recruitment".
For variants, you'd typically use "Does Not Contain Any Of" to exclude multiple variations at once - like ["Recruit", "Recruiter", "Recruiting", "Recruitment"] - rather than listing them separately.
Special characters like slashes shouldn't affect the substring matching since the operator looks for the text pattern anywhere within the field.
However, I don't see specific documentation about the order of operations between includes and excludes in our filtering system. Are you seeing "Operations / Recruitment" slip through when you have "Recruit" in your exclusions, or is this working as expected now?
Joe H.
·
·
Hmm this contradicts my experience
Clay Support
APP
·
·
You're right to question this - let me help troubleshoot what's happening with your exclusions.
The "Does Not Contain" operator should work with substring matching, but there might be something specific about your setup causing the issue. [1]
Can you share the exact exclusion filter you set up and maybe paste a few example job titles that are slipping through? This will help me see if there's something with the formatting, special characters, or how the exclusion is configured that's causing the unexpected behavior. [2]
Joe H.
·
·
I had "Recruit" in the "Does not Contain" but it still showed "Operations / Recruitment" in the Results Preview
Joe H.
·
·
Let me find the example
Clay Support
APP
·
·
That's definitely unexpected behavior. The "Does Not Contain" operator should exclude records with "Recruit" as a substring, so "Operations / Recruitment" shouldn't appear in your results. [1]
This sounds like a bug. When you find that example, can you share:
The exact filter setup you're using
A screenshot of the Results Preview showing "Operations / Recruitment"
Whether this is happening in a specific data provider or search tool
This will help me understand what's going wrong with the exclusion logic.
Clay Support
APP
·
·
Is that what you were looking for?
Clay Support
APP
·
·
If you still need help resolving the issue with exclusions not working as expected, I’m here to assist. Would you like to provide more details or examples about what you’re trying to achieve so we can continue troubleshooting?