Become Unstoppable in Recruiting and Prospecting with Clay

By reading this article, you’ll discover how to leverage Clay to create a targeted prospect list and strategically personalize your approaches.

You’ll also learn how to simplify and streamline essential tasks, making your prospecting and recruiting process smoother and more efficient.

In 2024, data research and enrichment have become crucial for effective prospecting.

Clay is a prospecting platform that simplifies and accelerates these processes through automation and artificial intelligence.

Initially designed for sales teams, Clay quickly demonstrated its potential in other fields.

For recruiters, it’s a powerful ally that enhances how we approach candidate sourcing and engagement.

Let’s see why Clay has become an indispensable tool!

Why is Clay relevant for recruiting?

This platform helps you identify and contact companies by consolidating data from over 75 sources.

What makes Clay particularly effective for recruiting is its ability to draw inspiration from advanced marketing strategies, especially in the outbound area.

With minimal data, Clay allows you to generate a wealth of information about both target profiles and the companies they are in.

As a RecOps, I highly recommend including Clay in recruiters’ tool stacks.

It’s relevant and effective for all recruiters involved in sourcing (RPO, in-house recruiters, agency consultants, etc.). You centralize a multitude of tools on a single platform.

Here, we draw inspiration from ABM (Account Based Marketing).

Let’s discover what ABM is and why it’s so effective in optimizing our sourcing efforts.

What is ABM?

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing strategy focused on targeting specific accounts rather than casting a wide net across the market.

Unlike traditional approaches that aim to attract a broad range of prospects, ABM focuses on identifying and personalizing marketing efforts for specific companies with a high likelihood of conversion.

The Benefits of ABM

1. Precise Targeting: ABM starts with the selection of key accounts. These accounts are chosen based on their size, industry, revenue potential, and other strategic criteria.
2. Increased Efficiency: By focusing on the most promising accounts, resources are used more efficiently to boost return on investment (ROI).
3. Personalization: Once target accounts are identified, marketing efforts are highly personalized. This can include tailored content campaigns, exclusive events, and direct communications tailored to the specific needs and challenges of each account.
4. Sales-Marketing Alignment: Close collaboration between sales and marketing teams is a hallmark of ABM. Both departments work together to create consistent messaging and share insights on targeted accounts.
5. Optimization: Like any marketing strategy, ABM requires continuous evaluation. Campaign performance is analyzed to understand what works and adjust tactics accordingly.

But how does this translate into the context of recruitment?

To fully leverage Clay, it’s essential to understand and master the next step.

Targeting is Key!

In recruitment, just like in sales, targeting is essential but often overlooked.

On my end, I build a mapping strategy coupled with an in-depth briefing with the client/hiring manager.

This allows me to centralize as much information as possible, better understand, and identify my ICP and persona.

Stable and Dynamic Signals

Once you know your ICP and persona, you look for two types of indicators for each category.

1. Stable Indicators:
   • ICP: Revenue, number of employees, headquarters location, international presence.
   • Persona: Job title, years of experience in the career, in the company, and in the current position.
2. Dynamic Indicators:
   • ICP: Recent activities over a defined period: participation in trade shows, fundraising, awards received, massive recruitments, job postings, CRM changes, etc.
   • Persona: Recent promotions, LinkedIn posts, content interactions, personal interests, etc.

Now that we’ve identified the criteria, this is where Clay shines with its ability to centralize and automate these tasks to maximize efficiency.

Company Research and Enrichment

This is where Clay comes into play!

If the targeting has been well done beforehand, you should have a list of relevant companies where you can source the profiles that interest you.

Whether you’re an in-house recruiter or in a recruitment agency, the method is the same.

What differs in an agency is that consultants will also work on identifying and approaching client profiles.

Let’s take a concrete example for a Data Consultant position.

I start by retrieving my list of centralized accounts in my mapping. It’s from this list that I will source the relevant profiles.

At this stage, I still have too little data. I start with the company names and gather as many signals as possible for my approaches (commercial and/or candidate).

For each recruitment, I use the mindmapping tool Whimsical:

NB: I regularly update my mapping. When I need to revisit the same position later (6 months, a year later), I start with 90% of the work already done. Otherwise, I would have forgotten everything and would have to start from scratch, which leads to a considerable loss of time.

Data Enrichment in Clay

Copy and paste all your companies:

From this single piece of data, you can enrich a maximum amount of information.

We talked about signals earlier. There is a lot of interesting data to gather about companies.

For example:

• Company description
• Domain name
• Number of employees (by role, by department)
• Date of foundation
• Social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)
• Investors
• Job offers
• News
• Revenue
• Tech stack
• Competitors

For our case, we will add some additional data to enrich our starting base.

Here is the result in Clay:

Here, I found in 2 clicks and automatically, the domain names, current job offers, company descriptions, their latest news, the number of employees, LinkedIn profiles…

But Clay goes even further!

Thanks to its AI Agent, you can automate even more complex tasks.

AI Agent: The Killer Feature

In our dashboard, I used Clay’s AI agent to make our file more relevant.

I believe this is one of the features that puts Clay ahead of its competitors.

What is Claygent?

It’s the intelligent agent integrated into Clay. It’s designed to automate and optimize data search processes. It uses AI to perform complex and repetitive tasks.

Here’s a detailed overview of its features and usefulness:

1. Web Scraping:
   • Claygent can browse the web in real-time to extract up-to-date information on profiles or companies.
2. Message Personalization:
   • Thanks to the integration with OpenAI, Claygent can generate personalized messages for each prospect based on the data available in our database. The more enriched the database, the more accurate the agent will be.
3. Data Cleaning and Formatting:
   • Claygent can clean and format raw data. For example, you can standardize company or person names, segment information into specific categories (B2B vs. B2C, senior or junior profile, Series A, B, C funding rounds, etc.).
4. Data Enrichment:
   • By using multiple data sources, Claygent enriches information on profiles and companies.
5. Automating Repetitive Tasks:
   • Claygent can automate repetitive tasks like updating CRMs and sending email sequences.

We’ve just seen what the AI Agent can theoretically do, but how does this translate into practice?

To give you a concrete idea, here are some use cases tested on our database.

Use Case with the Claygent Feature

1 - Visit Company Websites

Here, I’ll ask my AI agent to look for specific information by browsing company websites.

You can use different models (GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5, or Claude Sonnet). Select your OpenAI account or Clay’s account directly. Write your prompt as you would in ChatGPT. Test and iterate based on the responses you get.

What’s interesting is the use of dynamic fields that come from our database.

For example, I want to automatically gather data and AI projects that companies have done for their clients.

So, I’ll ask the AI to visit the sites directly in the prompt.

If you’ve followed along so far, we enriched the domain name from the company name at the beginning.

At first glance, you might think this info is useless.

Quite the opposite!

This is what we call the waterfall effect: enriching one piece of data (like finding the domain name) allows us to cumulatively enrich several other pieces of data (the LinkedIn company URL, info search via AI, a specific profile related to the company, etc.).

Here’s a response from my Claygent:

By the way, you can see that it gives me a brief summary of the projects carried out by the company when I asked for details on each project.

Two options:

1. Improve my initial prompt.
2. Create a new Claygent with a prompt that gives the AI the first response obtained (the one in the photo) and ask it to visit all the links to provide a complete summary of each project.

I chose the second option and here is a much more precise result:

2 - Find the Decision Makers

Here, I will ask my AI agent to find the CEOs and HR Directors of the companies.

It’s the same principle as the previous example.

We will write a prompt and take a new dynamic field (the LinkedIn company URL).

You get it, the possibilities are endless with Claygent.

From the data collected, you can create agents that will save you a ton of time.

One last example:

Remember, at the beginning of the article, I listed the interesting data to collect via Clay. There is one that I find particularly useful: looking for company news. Therefore, I enriched my database with the latest news for each company.

This data can be used for:

• Nurturing prospects and/or candidates
• Feeding our ATS/CRM
• Generating messages/emails/icebreakers with Claygent

Finalize Your Process with Jarvi

Once you’ve used Clay to identify and enrich profiles of prospects or candidates, the next step is to manage them efficiently in a specialized tool like an ATS/CRM.

Export Results from Clay to Jarvi

To fully leverage your data, you can easily export the results and import them into Jarvi, designed to optimize your contact management.

Jarvi allows you to centralize all your profiles and clients in one place, categorize them, and most importantly, contact them automatically through multiple channels (email, LinkedIn, InMail).

1. Export from Clay:

   This part is also powerful given the export options available.

   You can, in a traditional manner, export to CSV, Excel, Google Sheets, Airtable, but also directly into an ATS like Hubspot or an emailing tool like Lemlist, Instantly, La Growth Machine…

1. Import into Jarvi:

   Jarvi allows you to precisely map all the columns exported from Clay to ensure each piece of data is placed correctly in the tool.

   Let’s take our use case. With specific information like examples of projects completed by each company, you can create a custom field “Client Project Examples” in Jarvi.

   This will allow you to visualize and directly utilize this data in your campaigns or during your phone conversations with candidates/prospects.

Automate Sending Personalized Messages

With Jarvi, you can create automated message campaigns and follow-ups.

1. Creating Campaigns: Use the imported information to segment your contacts and create specific approaches. The data found in Clay can become dynamic variables to integrate into your outreach messages.
2. Tracking Responses: Jarvi centralizes all interactions regardless of the communication channel, allowing you to easily track your conversation history.

Integrating Jarvi into your workflow gives you a complete sourcing or prospecting process.

Not only do you save time by automating repetitive tasks, but you also improve the quality of your approaches.

Conclusion: A Winning Duo for Recruitment and Prospecting

With Clay for data enrichment and Jarvi for managing and automating exchanges, you have a powerful and complementary toolset.

Clay becomes an essential tool in marketing, sales, and recruitment sectors. Its data enrichment, automation, and AI features make it a powerful asset.

At every stage of the process, these two tools help you save valuable time while increasing your efficiency.

For us recruiters, using Jarvi and Clay is a game-changer. It’s no longer just about finding candidates but building truly targeted and personalized recruitment strategies.

There’s only one way to adopt the tool, and that’s to try it out 😉

I hope I’ve convinced you ;)

Here’s the website link: https://www.clay.com/

In the next article, we’ll see how to find and enrich profiles in Clay.

If you have any questions or want to know more, feel free to contact me.

Virgile Ferrand LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/virgile-f/ Email: virgileferrand.formation@gmail.com