Concerns About Clay Sourcing Employee Metrics on LinkedIn
How is clay sourcing people? I notice the LinkedIn page has 100s of employees but most commonly 0-2 people get fetched
How is clay sourcing people? I notice the LinkedIn page has 100s of employees but most commonly 0-2 people get fetched
Clay sources people through our "Find People" feature which searches based on specific criteria you set - not by pulling all employees from a company's LinkedIn page. When you use Find People, we search for individuals matching your filters like job titles, location, experience, and bio keywords rather than importing entire employee lists. The default limit is 100 results, and you can increase this up to 250. If you're only getting 0-2 people, your search filters may be too restrictive. Try broadening criteria like job titles, locations, or removing specific keyword requirements to capture more relevant contacts.
even when I remove all filters for a company, it still states 0 people at the company. Something doesn't seem right
When Find People returns 0 results even with no filters, the issue is likely with your company identifier. Make sure you're using the company's LinkedIn URL rather than just the domain - LinkedIn URLs work much better for finding people. Also verify that your "Company Identifier" field is properly mapped to a column containing valid LinkedIn profile URLs or domains. If you're using domains instead of LinkedIn URLs, try switching to LinkedIn URLs as the company identifier for better results. If the problem persists with proper LinkedIn URLs, the company may have limited public profile data available through our search.
No, that still didn't do it. It's already the linkedin identifier
Hi Aaron - thanks so much for reaching out. Do you mind providing the table URL in which you're doing this search? The "Find People" search updates every couple of weeks, so this might be why you're seeing this. Additionally, if the companies are a lot smaller or the people's profiles are private, you may also see issues with the search finding people.
I'm targeting companies on average of 50+ in size (per linkedin) so I would at least expect closer to parity with the LinkedIn profiles but it seems to be completely off base
which in effect, would make the sourcing from companies -> people not very useful for me. I imagine maybe a better approach in this situation is to avoid the sourcing altogether in favor of enrichment via the company fields?
The mismatch you’re seeing between LinkedIn search filters and Clay’s “Find People” results happens because the data in “Find People” can be out of date by 2–3 weeks, while “Enrich Company” pulls fresher information from multiple sources. For your use case (targeting companies 50+ employees), you’ll get much closer to parity with LinkedIn if you: 1. Start with a company list (domains or LinkedIn URLs) 2. Run Enrich Company with multiple providers to get the most up-to-date headcount 3. Filter for companies that meet your size criteria 4. Only then run Find People on the filtered list This flips the workflow from companies → people sourcing to companies → enrichment → people, which should improve accuracy
even with the out of date consideration, these companies are not fluctuating to the extent of 0 to 1 when there should be 50. Is there any reason for the huge disparity? My current workflow is going down this path (i.e. provide the companies first that I know have this headcount) and then find people within those companies but it seems to be questionable when I run the action from the parent company table (always says 0 cells or at most, I've seen 2) when these are companies with 50 - 200 employees
I've removed all filters by role and otherwise to be as generous as possible but still run into some issues there. I'm not sure if this is related to being on a free tier plan right now (though still having free credits) as an artificial limiter at this granularity or a real blocker
Happy to clear things up here. The reason you're not seeing individual contacts might be due to data coverage limitations, not because you're on the free plan. Even for companies with 50–200 employees, Clay may only return a handful of discoverable profiles due to: ** Private or restricted LinkedIn profiles – Clay can't access these without live LinkedIn sessions. ** Coverage gaps in aggregated databases – Some employees simply aren't represented. ** Quality filters – Profiles with very few connections are filtered out to avoid low-quality or fake results. This explains why you see 0–2 contacts even when you know a company has many more employees. Some workarounds could be: ** Keep filters broad and general when finding people. * Use Claygent or other integrations (Apollo.io, People Data Labs, etc.) to supplement profiles not in Clay's databases. Hope that helps!