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Clay helps go-to-market teams turn their growth ideas into reality. It does the same for recruiting. The data orchestration frameworks are identical - instead of accounts and leads, you're working with candidates and pipelines.
At Clay, we've grown from 80 to over 400 people in the last year, and Clay has been one of the most integral parts of how we did it. Here's how we use it across three motions.
Find candidates: no stone unturned
Most sourcing workflows are limited by the surfaces they can search and the data points they can filter on. Clay removes both constraints.
Recruiting teams can source from multiple surfaces simultaneously: Twitter/X, Google Maps, company lists, Github, and Clay's own data, then layer in the data points that matter to you. That might mean analyzing a candidate's background for a specific set of competencies, checking whether an AE lists quota attainment on their profile as a proxy for being ready to leave, finding a developer's GitHub to see if their side projects reflect the right experience, or using Claygent to open a designer's portfolio to evaluate whether their work is relevant to the role.
Or say you're a design recruiter and you want to find designers who follow a designer you admire. Pull their followers directly from X into Clay, use Claygent to find their LinkedIn profiles, enrich them against your criteria, and you've turned a social graph into a qualified sourcing list.
You can use Clay to find the unique signals that matter to you.
Sourcing isn't just an outbound activity either. One of the highest-signal plays is activating your own employee network. We use Clay to ingest employee connection exports and filter down to people they actually overlapped with at past companies - building not just a shortlist for warm leads, but a database of strong connections to draw from over time. At Clay, 47% of hires last quarter came from referrals built this way.
We also use Clay to run more automated sourcing using Claygent - a recruiter inputs their target company and defines a prompt for Claygent to source against. The recruiter gets complete autonomy on criteria and Claygent does the heavy lifting of searching against it. From there, we summarize the fit and send it back to recruiters, either within Clay or in Slack.
Prioritize candidates: spend time on the right people
High inbound volume makes it hard to be effective. Clay augments the steps a recruiter would naturally take during application review - going beyond simple matching to ask the questions that actually matter.
Was this candidate at their last company during a high-growth period? Does their background reflect the specific competencies this role needs — not just what's standard for the title, but what's specific to your context? For a growth marketing hire, that might mean flagging entrepreneurial experience as a differentiator. For a technical role, it might mean cross-referencing a candidate's past employers for tech stacks that are similar to yours.
The humans are still making every decision. Clay just makes sure those decisions are as informed as possible.
Beyond inbound, signal-based recruiting is how you play the long game. Talent acquisition isn't only about filling open roles today - it's about knowing when the right moment arrives for a candidate you've been watching. Clay monitors changes to companies, people, and news you care about, so you can be the first to act when there's a relevant exec departure, a funding event, or any other signal that a conversation might finally make sense.
Lastly, your ATS (applicant tracking system) is also worth revisiting! Most teams have thousands of past applicants - silver medalists, candidates who applied at the wrong seniority, pipelines that were deprioritized. By bringing that data into Clay, you can find out who's worth resurfacing, understand where people landed when they didn't choose your company, and find talent that is already warm.
Reach candidates: accurate outreach that gets responses
Finding and scoring candidates is only useful if you can reach them with something worth responding to.
Clay runs a waterfall of data providers to find personal email addresses and phone numbers for passive candidates. And since candidates have already been enriched, outreach can reference specific, accurate data points - tenure, past projects, growth signals - rather than generic copy.
From there, data can be pushed out of Clay into your ATS or CRM through webhooks, or sequenced directly in Clay - whichever fits how your team already works.
The bigger shift
Recruiting has always been about finding the right people at the right time and acting on it faster than everyone else. What's changed is that AI makes that possible at a scale that wasn't realistic before. Clay gives recruiting teams the same leverage GTM teams have - more signal, less manual work, and the right data to make better decisions. The time you get back is time you can put into the craftsmanship of recruiting: building relationships, thinking creatively, and finding people in ways nobody else thought to look.
Want to see how these builds work from the inside? Watch How Clay Uses Clay Episode 8 for a live walkthrough of the tables and architecture behind each of these plays.
Clay helps go-to-market teams turn their growth ideas into reality. It does the same for recruiting. The data orchestration frameworks are identical - instead of accounts and leads, you're working with candidates and pipelines.
At Clay, we've grown from 80 to over 400 people in the last year, and Clay has been one of the most integral parts of how we did it. Here's how we use it across three motions.
Find candidates: no stone unturned
Most sourcing workflows are limited by the surfaces they can search and the data points they can filter on. Clay removes both constraints.
Recruiting teams can source from multiple surfaces simultaneously: Twitter/X, Google Maps, company lists, Github, and Clay's own data, then layer in the data points that matter to you. That might mean analyzing a candidate's background for a specific set of competencies, checking whether an AE lists quota attainment on their profile as a proxy for being ready to leave, finding a developer's GitHub to see if their side projects reflect the right experience, or using Claygent to open a designer's portfolio to evaluate whether their work is relevant to the role.
Or say you're a design recruiter and you want to find designers who follow a designer you admire. Pull their followers directly from X into Clay, use Claygent to find their LinkedIn profiles, enrich them against your criteria, and you've turned a social graph into a qualified sourcing list.
You can use Clay to find the unique signals that matter to you.
Sourcing isn't just an outbound activity either. One of the highest-signal plays is activating your own employee network. We use Clay to ingest employee connection exports and filter down to people they actually overlapped with at past companies - building not just a shortlist for warm leads, but a database of strong connections to draw from over time. At Clay, 47% of hires last quarter came from referrals built this way.
We also use Clay to run more automated sourcing using Claygent - a recruiter inputs their target company and defines a prompt for Claygent to source against. The recruiter gets complete autonomy on criteria and Claygent does the heavy lifting of searching against it. From there, we summarize the fit and send it back to recruiters, either within Clay or in Slack.
Prioritize candidates: spend time on the right people
High inbound volume makes it hard to be effective. Clay augments the steps a recruiter would naturally take during application review - going beyond simple matching to ask the questions that actually matter.
Was this candidate at their last company during a high-growth period? Does their background reflect the specific competencies this role needs — not just what's standard for the title, but what's specific to your context? For a growth marketing hire, that might mean flagging entrepreneurial experience as a differentiator. For a technical role, it might mean cross-referencing a candidate's past employers for tech stacks that are similar to yours.
The humans are still making every decision. Clay just makes sure those decisions are as informed as possible.
Beyond inbound, signal-based recruiting is how you play the long game. Talent acquisition isn't only about filling open roles today - it's about knowing when the right moment arrives for a candidate you've been watching. Clay monitors changes to companies, people, and news you care about, so you can be the first to act when there's a relevant exec departure, a funding event, or any other signal that a conversation might finally make sense.
Lastly, your ATS (applicant tracking system) is also worth revisiting! Most teams have thousands of past applicants - silver medalists, candidates who applied at the wrong seniority, pipelines that were deprioritized. By bringing that data into Clay, you can find out who's worth resurfacing, understand where people landed when they didn't choose your company, and find talent that is already warm.
Reach candidates: accurate outreach that gets responses
Finding and scoring candidates is only useful if you can reach them with something worth responding to.
Clay runs a waterfall of data providers to find personal email addresses and phone numbers for passive candidates. And since candidates have already been enriched, outreach can reference specific, accurate data points - tenure, past projects, growth signals - rather than generic copy.
From there, data can be pushed out of Clay into your ATS or CRM through webhooks, or sequenced directly in Clay - whichever fits how your team already works.
The bigger shift
Recruiting has always been about finding the right people at the right time and acting on it faster than everyone else. What's changed is that AI makes that possible at a scale that wasn't realistic before. Clay gives recruiting teams the same leverage GTM teams have - more signal, less manual work, and the right data to make better decisions. The time you get back is time you can put into the craftsmanship of recruiting: building relationships, thinking creatively, and finding people in ways nobody else thought to look.
Want to see how these builds work from the inside? Watch How Clay Uses Clay Episode 8 for a live walkthrough of the tables and architecture behind each of these plays.
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