Clay hiring signals vs Salesgear: setup, cost per check, what you get back

Clay hiring signals and Salesgear Hiring intel answer different questions. Clay’s job postings and new hires signals watch a table of companies you built, on a schedule you pick from daily to quarterly, and drop the results into columns you can enrich further with its AI agent, Claygent, or any of its data providers. Salesgear Hiring intel reads the hiring posts written by people at your accounts and returns the initiative behind the roles, the tools they name, and the hiring manager who owns it, with a draft email that waits for your OK. Pick Clay if you have someone to build and maintain the table. Pick Salesgear if you want the initiative and the owner without building anything.

Everything about Clay below comes from Clay’s own pricing page and Signals documentation, as of October 2026. Prices change; check both before you buy.

TL;DR

• Setup. Clay: pick a signal, point it at a table with a company domain or company URL, set filters and a frequency, optionally add enrichments. Salesgear: pick Hiring intel, choose accounts or a list, done.
• Cost per check. Clay documents its new hire and job change signals at 1 action plus 0.2 data credits per check, with data credits from $0.05 each. Its docs do not list a fixed job postings price; Clay charges per result or per record checked and shows an estimate before the signal runs. Salesgear Hiring intel is 2 credits per company per check.
• What you get back. Clay returns rows you shape. Salesgear returns initiatives with roles, tech, skills, the owner, why it matters to what you sell, and a draft.
• Plans. Clay’s Free plan has no signals. Launch starts at $167 a month on annual billing, Growth at $446. Salesgear signals use the credits in your plan.
• Fair verdict. Clay is the more flexible workbench. Salesgear is the shorter path from a hiring post to the right person and a reviewed draft.

How Clay hiring signals work (as of October 2026)

Clay’s Signals documentation lists these signal types: topic intent, new hires, promotions, job change, job postings, news and fundraising, web intent, plus custom signals built on its enrichments. Two of them are hiring signals:

• Job postings: monitors when target companies open new roles.
• New hires: tracks people hired at target companies within the last three months, with filters for job titles and experience.

Setting one up follows the same seven steps in Clay’s docs:

1. Open Signals and choose the signal type.
2. Choose the table, and the column with the identifier the signal reads. For job postings and new hires that is a company domain or a company profile URL.
3. Configure filters, for example the titles you care about.
4. Set the frequency: quarterly, monthly, biweekly, weekly or daily. Monthly is the default.
5. Optionally add enrichments, for example a Claygent column to summarize each result.
6. Optionally add sample results to preview.
7. Save and run.

The strength here is control. You decide the table, the filters, the cadence and every column that follows. The cost of that control is that someone has to build the table, keep the identifiers clean, and write the prompts that turn a list of postings into a reason to reach out.

What a hiring check costs in Clay

Clay prices two units. Actions cover platform work and “cost less than a cent each”. Data credits pay for the data itself and “start at $0.05 each”, per the pricing page. Signals spend both.

Clay item (as of Oct 2026)	What Clay publishes
Free plan	$0; 500 actions and 100 data credits a month; no signals
Launch plan	From $167 a month billed annually; signals for job change, promotions, new hires, company news and social listening
Growth plan	From $446 a month billed annually; adds web intent signals, webhooks, CRM sync
New hires signal	1 action plus 0.2 data credits per check (docs)
Job change signal	1 action plus 0.2 data credits per check (docs)
Job postings signal	Not listed as a fixed price. Clay’s docs say signals charge per result or per record checked, and show an estimate for your cadence before the signal runs
No result found	“If an enrichment returns no result, you’re not charged Data Credits or Actions”
Enrichments you add	Each extra column (Claygent, a provider lookup) spends its own actions and credits

At the entry data credit price, 0.2 data credits is $0.01, plus one action at under a cent, so a new hires check costs a little under two cents before any enrichment you add. That is our arithmetic from Clay’s published numbers, not a Clay quote. The full cost of a working hiring signal in Clay also includes the columns that interpret it, and the time of whoever maintains the table.

How Salesgear Hiring intel works

Salesgear starts from a different source: the posts that people at your accounts write when they are hiring. Those posts carry two things a job board row usually does not: the initiative in the manager’s own words, and the manager’s name. One check does this:

• Searches the account’s own people for posts about openings, including “join our team” and “open role” phrasing. The first check covers the last 30 days.
• Drops the noise with a ranker: event recaps, job seekers, roles at other companies and agency posts for a client.
• Checks each poster still works at the account.
• Reads each role: title, team, seniority, up to 8 named technologies, up to 6 skills, location, and the initiative it serves.
• Rolls roles into one finding per initiative per month, up to 5 per account per check, and names the owner: the hiring manager who posted most of them, never a recruiter or a peer.
• With a seller profile picked, ranks initiatives by relevance to what you sell and adds why it matters and the next step, naming one person or title at Director level or above.

From there an agent can research the account, find the right person, check they are still there and write the draft. Nothing sends on its own; every draft waits for your OK.

What a hiring check costs in Salesgear

Hiring intel is a deep intel signal: 2 credits per company per check, charged whether or not it finds a role. It runs monthly by default, weekly if you want it. An account with no company page to search is skipped and not charged. Credits come from your plan; on the current Salesgear pricing page the Basic, Pro and Pro Plus data plans include 1,200, 4,000 and 10,000 credits a month for $49, $99 and $199, which puts one company check between about 4 and 8 cents depending on plan.

For 200 accounts checked monthly, that is 400 credits a month. The reading of each role, the initiative and the owner are included in those 2 credits; there is no extra column to pay for to get them.

Clay vs Salesgear: what you get back

	Clay hiring signals	Salesgear Hiring intel
Input	A Clay table with a company domain or company URL column	Your accounts, or an account list
Source	Job postings and new hires data, per Clay’s signal	Hiring posts by people who work at the account
Frequency	Daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly or quarterly	Monthly by default, or weekly
What lands	Rows of postings or hires, plus any columns you add	One finding per initiative: roles, tech, skills, location
The owner	Not by default; add enrichment to find the hiring manager	Named: the hiring manager who posted, or the senior buyer for that function
Why it matters to you	Write a Claygent prompt for it	Included when you pick a seller profile
Still there check	Add an enrichment	Built in for each poster
Next step	Send rows to your sequencer, CRM (Growth plan) or Clay’s own sequencer	An agent drafts the email; you approve it
Who maintains it	Whoever owns the Clay table	Nobody; it runs on the accounts you track
Price unit	Actions plus data credits, per check or per result	2 credits per company per check

Where Clay is the better pick

• You want the job descriptions themselves. Salesgear reads what people post, not full careers page listings. If you need every posting with its full text, Clay’s job postings signal is built for that.
• You want daily checks. Clay offers a daily cadence. Salesgear Hiring intel is monthly or weekly.
• You already run Clay. If your team has a GTM engineer and tables that feed your CRM, adding a hiring signal is a small step, and you can combine it with 150+ data providers and your own prompts.
• You need many signal types in one table. Clay puts hiring, news, fundraising, topic and web intent next to each other on one table.

Where Salesgear fits better

• You want the initiative and the owner, not a list of postings. That is the default output, with no prompt to write.
• No one on the team builds tables. Hiring intel runs on the accounts you already track.
• You want the outreach in the same place. The draft, the sequence and the dialer are in Salesgear, and every draft waits for your OK.
• You want a fixed price per check. 2 credits per company, interpretation included.

For the broader comparison (data, research, sending, dialing), see Salesgear vs Clay.

Getting the same answer in Clay, or by hand

If you stay on Clay, you can get close to the initiative and owner output with one extra AI column on your job postings results. A prompt you can adapt:

Read these job postings from {Company}. Group the roles by the team they join.
For each group return: initiative (a short name, under 8 words), the roles,
the tools named, and the most senior hiring manager named in the postings.
If no hiring manager is named, return the title of the head of that team.
Use only facts in the postings. Return JSON.

Then add a lookup to confirm the hiring manager still works there before anything goes to your sequencer. Without any tool, the same routine takes about 30 minutes a week for 20 to 50 accounts; the steps are in our hiring signals guide, and the 20 roles worth watching are in job postings as buying signals.

Related reading

• Hiring signals for sales: find the initiative and the person who owns it
• Job postings as buying signals: 20 roles that tell you what a company will buy next
• 20 “tell me when” custom sales signals, from 193 sales calls
• Signal based selling tools compared
• 12 buying signals examples that show a buyer is ready to talk

Frequently asked questions