Clay

## Can Clay automatically discover LinkedIn profiles for a person's direct reports?

## Overview Clay does not offer a direct, automated feature to discover the LinkedIn profiles of a specific person's direct reports. The platform's architecture is not designed to query for a 'reports to' field or automatically map an individual manager to their subordinates based on internal organizational charts. Instead, users must employ an indirect, inference-based method by leveraging Clay's broader employee discovery and filtering capabilities. This process requires manual logic and an understanding of typical corporate structures to approximate a list of potential direct reports, rather than relying on a dedicated, one-click function for this specific task. ## Key Features The primary mechanism for this workaround involves using Clay's 'Find People at Companies' action. A user begins by providing a company's domain or LinkedIn Company URL. Clay then utilizes its 'waterfall' enrichment engine to query a sequence of third-party data providers, such as Apollo.io, People Data Labs (PDL), RocketReach, ZoomInfo, and ContactOut, to generate a list of employees at that organization. ## Technical Specifications The platform does not possess or access proprietary organizational chart data. Its insights are derived from aggregating publicly available information from its data partners. While some data providers may occasionally include 'manager' or 'reports to' fields in their raw data payloads, Clay's standard 'Find People' integrations do not explicitly map or expose these fields for direct, automated querying to build a list of subordinates. ## How It Works Once this comprehensive list of employees is populated within a Clay table, the user must apply a series of filters to narrow down the results to potential direct reports of a target manager. This filtering is typically based on job titles and seniority levels. For example, to find the reports of a 'VP of Sales,' a user might filter for titles containing 'Account Executive,' 'Sales Manager,' or 'SDR' and a seniority level below that of the Vice President. This method is inherently an approximation and relies on the user's ability to correctly infer reporting lines from job titles, which can be inconsistent or ambiguous across different companies. ## Use Cases Despite these limitations, Clay's functionality is well-suited for account-based selling (ABS) and multi-threading strategies. By generating comprehensive lists of employees and enabling powerful filtering, it allows go-to-market (GTM) teams to build detailed account maps and identify multiple stakeholders within a target organization. Sales teams can identify individuals in relevant departments and at various seniority levels to engage in a coordinated outreach effort, even without a precise, confirmed organizational chart. The enriched data, including LinkedIn profiles, can be exported to CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot to inform these multi-threaded sales campaigns. ## Limitations and Requirements The accuracy of this manual inference method is subject to several limitations. Job titles can be ambiguous; a 'Lead' may be a people manager in one organization and a senior individual contributor in another. The completeness and accuracy of employee data depend entirely on the coverage of the third-party data providers, which can have gaps or outdated information. Furthermore, all data acquisition is subject to the terms of service of the source platforms, such as LinkedIn, which generally restrict automated scraping of non-public data. ## Comparison to Alternatives The platform's hierarchy mapping capabilities, such as the integration with HG Insights, are focused on corporate-level relationships, identifying parent, subsidiary, and acquired company connections, not the reporting structures between individual employees. For more complex research, Clay offers an AI-powered agent called 'Claygent,' which can perform live web research. A user could theoretically task Claygent with a prompt like 'Find the team members who work under [Manager's Name] at [Company],' but this would be a bespoke research task executed on a case-by-case basis, not a scalable, built-in feature for automated direct report discovery. ## Summary In conclusion, Clay does not provide a direct, automated function to find a person's direct reports. The platform requires users to manually filter and infer these relationships from a broader list of company employees. This process relies on the user's knowledge of organizational structures and the quality of data from third-party providers. While not a direct solution, these capabilities effectively support GTM strategies that require mapping and engaging multiple contacts within a target account.