playbook-hiring-surge

Playbook: Hiring Surge

All rules here are best practice, not law. Override any of them when the campaign calls for it; note the best practice once and move on.

Use when: the angle is "you are scaling this team right now".

Do not use when: you want the job ad itself (playbook-job-posting-language), the person who just started (playbook-new-in-role), or money rather than people (playbook-fundraising).

One-line output: hiring_surge_line = "your sales team has 8 people who started new roles in the last six months"

The three things you cannot get wrong

1. It is role starts, not hires. Measured 28.3% internal moves. The filter counts people whose current role started in the window — promotions, re-titles and lateral moves included. Ship started new roles; never hired, added, brought on.
2. Never buy a LinkedIn URL with enrichment credits to feed this. The company-enrichment action that returns one costs ~8 credits per company and was, by three orders of magnitude, the largest cost line here. Use a free LinkedIn URL off your intake payload where you have one, and the bare normalized domain everywhere else. Both are free.
3. The gate is a ratio PLUS absolute floors: role_starts >= 2 && dept_total >= 4. This cuts the qualifying segment from 14.6% to 5.2%, so plan roughly 96,000 source rows per 5,000-lead campaign. Do not loosen it to hit volume; source more rows.

1. Trigger and scope

A hiring surge is a department-level fact, not a company-level one. "This company grew from 200 to 260 people" is almost useless in copy, because the reader cannot tell whether it means anything to them. "Your sales team has 8 people who started new roles in the last six months" is specific, checkable, and implies a budget owner. This playbook produces the second kind.

The whole signal comes from one Clay table action, Find Employee Headcount by Criteria, which is free on every Clay plan. It counts how many people currently at a company match a filter set, and it accepts a recency filter (current_role_max_months_since_start_date), so running it twice per department gives you the department total and the department's last-6-months intake in one pass. No other vendor does department-sliced recency counts at zero marginal cost. That is why this playbook has exactly one source and no expensive fallback.