Clay Beginner Tutorial: Using Hiring Signals to Find and Qualify Prospects
Hiring signals are one of the most powerful ways to identify companies that need your services right now. When a company is actively hiring for relevant roles, it’s a strong indicator they’re growing, have budget, and are open to solutions that can help them scale. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to use Clay to find companies hiring for specific roles, qualify them based on multiple criteria, and extract decision-makers to reach out to.
This guide is perfect if you’re running a SaaS company, marketing agency, professional services firm, recruitment agency, or any B2B business that benefits from reaching companies in growth mode. We’ll cover two approaches: starting with a company list and finding jobs at those companies, and starting with jobs first then filtering for the right companies.
Method 1: Start with Companies, Find Their Jobs
The most logical approach is to begin with a list of companies that fit your ideal customer profile. In Clay, click on “Find Companies” in the sources panel on the left. You’ll see extensive search criteria to build your list.
For this example, let’s say we want software companies with 11-50 employees in California. Set your filters accordingly: company size, industry (software development), and location (California). You might see thousands of companies matching these criteria—in this case, over 9,000.
Pro tip: Spend time familiarizing yourself with all available search criteria. Use description keywords to exclude companies you don’t want, like “staffing agency,” “recruitment agency,” or “recruiting firm.” Many recruitment agencies register themselves under the industries they serve, so you’ll want to filter them out if they’re not your target.
Once you’ve built your list, click “Continue” and import to a new table. Now you have your base company list.
Finding Jobs at These Companies
With your company list ready, click “Add” and search for “Find Jobs” as a source. This doesn’t cost any Clay credits to search, which is great. The interface will automatically select your company table, but make sure you select the correct view.
Click “Show Details” and select “Default View.” You’ll see how many jobs Clay has found at these companies. Pay attention to the company identifier—you can use either the LinkedIn URL or domain. In most cases, the company LinkedIn URL is more accurate because domains can sometimes pull in parent companies when you only want the subsidiary.
Now narrow down the jobs by using job title keywords. If you’re targeting companies hiring salespeople, use terms like “sales,” “SDR,” “BDR,” “sales development.” Use root-level keywords that will capture variations—”sales” will pull up “sales rep,” “sales manager,” “sales director,” etc.
Important: Also add exclusion keywords to filter out irrelevant roles. Exclude terms like “support,” “administrative,” “coordinator,” “junior,” “intern.” You can use Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini to generate comprehensive lists of keywords to include and exclude.
Set location preferences too. A company might be headquartered in California but hiring for a role in India or the Philippines. If you reach out mentioning their California hiring, it won’t be relevant. Set “Preferred Locations” to California or United States to keep signals relevant.
You might also want to filter by posting date—jobs posted within the last 30 days are more current and indicate active hiring rather than companies just collecting resumes.
Once configured, save your search and import to a new table. You now have a jobs table with company name, job title, location, domain, LinkedIn URL, and posting date.
The Magic: Lookup Multiple Rows in Other Table
Here’s where it gets powerful. You have a company table with thousands of companies and a jobs table with a few hundred jobs. How do you know which companies have jobs and which don’t? More importantly, how many jobs does each company have?
Use Clay‘s “Lookup Multiple Rows in Other Table” feature. In your companies table, click “Actions” and search for “Lookup Multiple Rows in Another Table.”
Select your jobs table as the table to search. Choose “Domain” as the target column (or company LinkedIn URL). Set it to “Equals” and map it to the domain column from your companies table. This tells Clay: “For each company in my companies table, find all matching jobs in my jobs table where the domains match.”
Click “Save and Run 10 Rows” to test. You’ll see companies that have jobs will show all their job records. You can also add “Number of Results” as a column—rename it “Number of Jobs.”
Run this column on all rows. When complete, you’ll see which companies have jobs and how many. Most won’t have any jobs in the database, but the ones that do are your hottest prospects.
Creating Filtered Views and Finding Decision Makers
Create a filtered view by duplicating the default view and naming it something like “Has Jobs” or “Companies with Jobs.” Add a filter where “Number of Jobs” is not empty. Now you’re looking only at companies actively hiring.
Sort by number of jobs (9 to 0) to see which companies are hiring most aggressively. These are prime targets. You can segment them into tiers:
- Tier 1: Companies with 2+ relevant job openings
- Tier 2: Companies with 1 job opening
- Tier 3: Companies with no current openings (still worth reaching out, but lower priority)
Now find decision-makers at these companies. Click “Add” and select “Find People” as a source. In the company section, make sure to select your filtered “Has Jobs” view, not the default view with all companies. Choose job titles like “CEO,” “Founder,” “Co-founder,” “Head of Sales,” “VP Sales,” “Sales Director.”
Since you filtered for small companies (11-50 employees), reaching out to founders makes sense. For larger companies, you’d want to target more specific roles like VP of Sales rather than the CEO.
Use the “Contains” option for job titles rather than “Similar to” for more control. Generate comprehensive lists of titles to include and exclude using AI tools to speed up the process.
Import to a new table, and you now have your people table with decision-makers at companies actively hiring.
Bringing Company Data into Your People Table
In your people table, look at the “Company Table Data” section. This shows data available from your companies table. Add columns like “Company Description,” “Company LinkedIn URL,” and crucially, “Number of Jobs.”
Having “Number of Jobs” in your people table means you can personalize outreach: “Hey Sarah, I noticed you have 6 sales roles open at [Company Name]. I work with fast-growing software companies to help them…”
This kind of specific, relevant signal makes your outreach far more effective than generic cold emails.
Method 2: Start with Jobs, Filter to Right Companies
The second approach is to start with jobs first. This can be more efficient because you’re not searching through thousands of companies where 97% don’t have relevant jobs.
Create a new workbook and select “Find Jobs” as your starting source. Without selecting a company table, you can search all jobs in Clay‘s database.
Add job title keywords like “sales,” set location to California, and you’ll see thousands of results. The challenge here is you can’t filter by company attributes like you could when starting with companies.
Use job description keywords to narrow down. Terms like “startup,” “pre-seed,” “seed-funded” indicate smaller, growing companies. Set maximum days since posted (e.g., 30 days) to focus on active hiring.
Import to a new table. Now you have jobs, but they’re at companies of all sizes—including massive enterprises you don’t want to target.
Building an Unwanted Companies List
Here’s a clever technique: create a table of companies that are too big for you. Go to “Find Companies” and set location to California, company size to 500+ employees (or whatever threshold you choose), and select any industry. Import this as your “Unwanted Companies” table.
Back in your jobs table, use “Lookup Single Row in Other Table” (not multiple, since each job has only one company). Select your Unwanted Companies table, match on Company LinkedIn URL, and run it.
Add the result as a column called “Unwanted Company Name.” Any job where this column has a value is at a company that’s too big. Create a filtered view where “Unwanted Company Name” is empty—these are jobs at companies within your target size range.
Deduplicating and Qualifying Companies
Use “Send Table Data” to create a new table of companies to qualify. Set a run condition to only send rows where “Unwanted Company Name” has no value. This creates a new table with just the companies you want.
Go to settings (cog icon) and enable “Auto Dedupe Rows” on Company LinkedIn URL. This removes duplicate companies so you’re not wasting credits running enrichment steps multiple times for the same company.
Now you can run Clay Agent or other enrichment steps to validate these companies—checking employee counts, technologies used, revenue estimates, or any other qualification criteria. Since you’ve deduplicated, you’re only running these steps once per company, saving significant credits.
Once qualified, create a filtered view of approved companies, then run a people search against that filtered view to find decision-makers.
Key Takeaways
Hiring signals are incredibly valuable for B2B prospecting. Companies actively hiring for relevant roles are demonstrating growth, budget, and immediate needs. Using Clay, you can systematically identify these companies, qualify them based on multiple criteria, and reach decision-makers with highly relevant messaging.
The “Lookup Multiple Rows in Other Table” feature is essential for connecting your jobs data back to companies and understanding which companies have the most hiring activity. Filtered views let you segment companies into tiers based on how aggressively they’re hiring.
Both methods—starting with companies or starting with jobs—have their place. Starting with companies gives you more control over company attributes upfront. Starting with jobs can be more efficient and catch companies you might have missed, though it requires additional filtering steps.
Remember to use AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT to generate comprehensive keyword lists for job titles, both to include and exclude. Take time to understand all available search criteria. Use location filters to ensure hiring signals are relevant. And always deduplicate before running expensive enrichment steps.
The companies you reach out to will immediately see you’ve done your research when you mention their specific open roles. That relevance is what turns cold outreach into warm conversations and ultimately into closed deals.
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