/playbook-hiring-surge

name: playbook-hiring-surge
description: Produces a copy-ready clause about a company adding people to one specific department in the last 6 months, plus the department-level headcount counts that drive the segment gate. Triggers on "they're hiring", "hiring surge", "growing their sales team", "scaling the team", "headcount growth", "who added SDRs", "companies that just built a marketing team". Outputs hiring_surge_line, a lowercase second-person clause that completes "Noticed <line>."

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.

Four things it does not do

• **It does not tell you who.** Counts only. Names are a different, non-free action.
• **It does not date the starts.** The copy can only ever say "in the last six months", never "in

March".

• **It does not pick your departments.** Sales and marketing are the two shown here; the same

pattern extends to engineering, RevOps, customer success or finance.

• **It does not prove anyone was HIRED.** Read this one before you write copy.

The promotion confound, measured

The filter counts people whose **current role started** in the last 6 months. That set includes external hires, internal promotions, title changes and lateral moves. LinkedIn also generates a new role start date when someone merely edits or re-titles an existing position.

• Supported by the data: `your sales team has 8 people who started new roles in the last six months`
• **Not supported, do not ship:** `you added 8 people to the sales team in the last six months`

The second sentence is a factual claim about the reader's own team that they can disprove instantly if three of those eight were promotions, and cold copy does not survive that.

**The over-count rate is measured: 28.3%.** Of 276 people whose current role started inside a six-month window across 18 companies, **78 were already working at that company before the window opened**. Sliced by title: sales-titled **24.4%**, marketing-titled **34.6%**. And that is a *lower bound* — the detector only sees a prior role that started 7+ months ago, so a February joiner promoted in July counts as a joiner. Real examples from the audit: a Business Development Representative who became a Mid-Market Account Executive; a Manager of Customer Success who became a Senior Manager; a Project Manager II who became a Project Manager III.

On one company in the audit, **5 of the 7 recent sales starters were internal moves** — "you hired 3 people for sales" would have been wrong about most of the evidence behind it.

Treat every count as an **upper bound** on hires. Roughly 1 reply in 4 has a right to say "nobody joined my team, I was promoted", and the locked prompt is written so that reply contradicts nothing you sent. If a client insists on "you hired", show them the 28.3% first. That is an operator sign-off, not a default.

**Re-measuring the confound on a new ICP is free** (about 40 searches). Per company, run two people searches: one for `current_role_max_months_since_start_date: 6` (the population the gate counts), one for everyone already there before the window (`include_past_experiences: true` with a `role_range_end_month` of `YYYY-MM`). Intersect on the LinkedIn profile URL: anyone in both started a new role at a company they already worked at.

2. Output contract

Inputs required per row

| Field | Type | Source | Required? | |---|---|---|---| | `company_linkedin_url` | string | your intake payload, as a free formula column | yes when present — this is the preferred and free identifier | | `company_domain` (fallback) | string, bare lowercase, no `www` | your list, via