What is Clay Find People?
Clay Find People is a source for discovering people who match criteria such as role, employer, location and experience. It creates a candidate audience for research. A search result does not by itself verify a contact's current role, email address or suitability for outreach.
By LeadHaste Editorial · AI-assisted editorial review ·
Start with the role you need
Clay's documentation describes company attributes and job-title matching among the available search inputs. Title matching can use different modes, including similar titles, contains and exact matching. That choice affects the candidate set. A broad match helps discover role variations, while a narrow match can exclude relevant people whose titles use different language. Review the actual results rather than treating the selected filter as proof of fit.
Company-first and people-first research
A team with an approved account list can look for relevant roles at those companies. A team exploring a market may start with people criteria and then qualify their employers. Keep those approaches explicit because they establish different audience boundaries. If account membership is mandatory, preserve the approved company identifier and verify it after search rather than assuming a returned employer name always matches the intended business.
What to check after sourcing
Inspect a representative sample for current employer, function and geography. Keep a source identifier or professional profile URL so later enrichments can resolve the correct person. Then apply exclusions before spending on additional contact data. A returned profile may be useful for research while still lacking a verified business email or a documented reason to contact that person. These are separate qualification stages.
Search is not a sending decision
Find People helps build the candidate list; enrichment adds information, and the outbound process decides whether the record should enter a campaign. Track how many candidates pass each stage so that poor matching is visible. If a sample repeatedly returns irrelevant people, revise the search and retest it before expanding. Increasing the number of results cannot fix an audience definition that points at the wrong roles or companies.
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