People search · Sourcing · Produces people
Finds people matching a search and feeds them into the workflow. This is the one sourcing step that starts a workflow from people rather than companies.
When to use it
Use it when your workflow is about contacts — for example, find VPs of Sales at a set of companies and enroll them in a sequence.
What it does
Runs a people search with the filters you set and enrolls the results as people records.
Configure it
Filters — build your search from person and company attributes in one list:
- Job title — match by role keywords. - Seniority — VP, C-level, Director, and so on. - Department — Sales, Marketing, and so on. - Sub-department — a level narrower than department, for when department alone is too broad — for example, splitting Engineering into software development or technical support. Sub-departments are grouped under their parent department in the picker. A sub-department that belongs to more than one department can be picked from any of them. - Persona — match against a persona you've saved in Ocean, instead of rebuilding its criteria by hand. - Role change — people who changed role in the last N months, optionally narrowed by the kind of change. This is the why-now filter: a brand-new VP of Sales is a different conversation from one three years in. - Tenure — how long someone has been in their current role, as a range in months. - Company filters — narrow by the person's company (industry, size, technologies, location, and so on — the same company filters as Company search). - Lookalike person / domain — find people similar to a seed person, a seed domain, or both together. (For a guided, seed-first version of this, use People lookalikes instead.)
People per run — the maximum number of people to bring in per run.
People per company — cap how many people to return from any one company (1–20).
Net new — leave on to skip people already in a lead list, an export, your CRM, or that this workflow already enrolled on an earlier run; turn off to include all of those.
Cost
0.2 credits per result. See Credits in workflows.
Gotchas
People search produces people. The steps after it must accept people — see Companies vs people in a workflow.
To get emails, follow it with an Enrich email and phone step.
With Net new on, a person already in your CRM, an export, or a lead list is excluded — a run can enroll nothing even though the search matched real people. That's Net new working as intended, not a broken search.