Apollo.io Tutorial For Recruiting: Find Jobs & Hiring Managers Using Apollo.io & Clay.com
If you’re a recruiter looking to find companies that are actively hiring and connect with the right decision makers, you need the right tools in your arsenal. In this guide, I’m going to show you some powerful techniques using Clay and Apollo.io that will transform your recruiting workflow.
Here’s the thing: using Apollo.io alone has significant disadvantages. Using Clay alone also has its limitations. But when you combine both tools strategically, you get the best of both worlds.
The Problem with Using Only Clay
Clay has a “find jobs” feature, but it comes with a major limitation. It doesn’t give you robust filters related to the actual companies you’re targeting. Want to find companies between 11 and 50 employees in a specific industry? Good luck doing that effectively with just the jobs search.
You could start with a “find companies” search and create a table that meets your criteria, then use that to find jobs. But here’s the catch: if you generate a list of 10,000 companies and then search for jobs within those companies, you’ll probably only find active job postings in about 100 to 300 of them. That’s a huge inefficiency.
The core issue is that Clay can’t easily identify companies of a certain size, in a certain industry, that are actively hiring for specific roles right now. This is where Apollo.io shines.
Why Apollo.io is Powerful for Finding Active Job Postings
Apollo.io allows you to search for specific job postings within defined parameters. You can filter by date range (like jobs posted within the last month), location (such as the United States), job title (like “Java Developer”), company size, and more.
For example, if you search for Java developer positions posted in the last month at companies with 50 to 80 employees, you might find over 2,000 relevant people. This is incredibly powerful because you’re finding companies that are actively hiring for the exact role you’re recruiting for.
Finding the Right Decision Makers
Once you’ve identified companies with active job postings, you need to find the right people to contact. For a Java developer role, you’ll want to reach CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Engineering Directors, and similar titles.
Here’s a pro tip: use ChatGPT (especially the O1 model with advanced reasoning) to generate comprehensive lists of relevant job titles. Ask it to provide a comma-separated list of decision makers in companies of your target size who would be involved in hiring for your specific role. Then ask if anything is missing or if there are permutations you haven’t considered.
You can also ask ChatGPT to generate job titles to exclude, like all HR and talent acquisition roles, or individual contributor titles like “coordinator” or “analyst” that won’t be decision makers.
The Major Disadvantage of Using Only Apollo.io
Now here’s where Apollo.io falls short. When you sort your results by company, you might notice something problematic: you could have 7, 10, or even 20+ people from the same company in your list.
Do you really want to contact that many people at one company? Probably not. Most of them won’t actually be stakeholders for that specific job. More importantly, email providers like Google, Outlook, Mimecast, Barracuda, and Proofpoint will notice when you send nearly identical emails to 20+ people at the same company. This is a fast track to burning your email domains and getting flagged as spam.
This duplication problem gets exponentially worse when you increase the employee headcount filter to larger companies with 200+ employees.
The Solution: Combining Apollo.io and Clay
Here’s the winning strategy that leverages the strengths of both platforms:
Step 1: Use Apollo.io to Find Companies That Are Hiring
In Apollo, search for job postings that match your criteria (job title, date posted, company size, location, etc.). But here’s the key: only search for one universal job title that exists in every company, like CEO, Managing Director, Founder, or Co-founder.
This gives you a list of all the companies that are actively hiring for your target role (like Java Developer), but you’re only getting one person per company. This list represents all the companies you want to target.
Step 2: Export and Import to Clay
Export this list from Apollo.io and import it into Clay. Now you have a table of companies that are actively hiring for the specific role you’re recruiting for.
Step 3: Use Clay’s Find People Search
In Clay, use the “find people” feature and specify that you only want to search within the companies from your imported table. Input all your relevant decision maker job titles (CTO, VP Engineering, Engineering Manager, etc.).
Here’s where Clay’s advantage comes in: you can set a limit per company. Maybe you want to find 7 people per company, knowing that some will be more qualified than others. This gives you control that Apollo doesn’t offer.
Step 4: Qualify Your Prospects
You can take this a step further by using ChatGPT inside Clay to rank the people you’ve found from 1 to 7 based on how suitable they are for your outreach. Then, only contact people with rankings of 1 to 5, ensuring you’re reaching the most relevant decision makers while staying under that critical threshold of contacts per company.
Step 5: Find the Actual Job Postings
Once you have your list of decision makers, use Clay’s “find jobs” feature again, but this time input the companies from your table. Search for job titles related to your role (like “Java”), filter by job type (full-time vs. contract), and you’ll have the actual job data.
You can even use tools like Apify to pull job descriptions without burning through your Clay credits unnecessarily.
Additional Tips for Success
When exporting from Apollo, consider whether you want to include catch-all emails. Including them gives you more leads to contact, but you’ll have a higher bounce rate. If you’re using email verification tools like BounceBan, you can verify catch-all emails to see if they’re actually deliverable before sending.
You can also widen your search by including multiple job titles in your initial Apollo search (like C++ Developer, Python Developer, Full Stack Developer, etc.) to generate a larger list of companies.
For email outreach, consider using dedicated cold email platforms like Instantly, SmartLead, or ScaledMail to manage your campaigns and protect your email deliverability.
Final Thoughts
By combining Apollo.io’s ability to find companies with active job postings and Clay‘s powerful people search with per-company limits, you create a recruiting workflow that’s both efficient and effective. You’ll target the right companies at the right time with the right decision makers, all while protecting your email reputation.
This approach takes a bit more setup than using just one tool, but the results speak for themselves. You’ll have higher quality leads, better response rates, and you won’t risk burning your email domains by spamming too many people at the same company.
If you have other ideas or techniques that have worked for you, I’d love to hear them. This is a constantly evolving space, and there’s always room to optimize these workflows further.
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