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Signal key

talent_outflow_to_competitor

Category

People

Source

Person profiles, competitor mapping required.
An employee left for a known competitor.

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When it fires

Trigger condition

employee_departed AND meta.new_company_id belongs to a known competitor (requires a competitor mapping).

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Stored fields

This signal persists the following metadata you can read downstream:

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Magnitude

Moderate to high, competitive intelligence value.
For the full bucket definitions used across percentage-based signals, see Magnitude buckets.

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Why it matters

Talent flowing to a rival is competitive intelligence in itself. When employees leave for a competitor, it can signal the rival is winning the talent war, paying more, or building something that’s attracting your target’s people, useful market intel even when it isn’t a direct buying trigger.

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How to use Talent Outflow to Competitor Signal?

The scenario. You lead talent acquisition at a mid-size software company. Exit interviews tell you why people say they left. They do not tell you the pattern: who is leaving, from which teams, and where they all seem to be going. The goal. See your own attrition the way a rival’s recruiter sees it, as a mapped flow, and intervene where it concentrates before a team quietly hollows out. The signal fires. talent_outflow_to_competitor fires on your own company: over recent months, several engineers, notably from the platform team, have moved to Vantablue Systems, your most direct competitor. Reading it. One departure is a career choice. A directional flow to the same competitor means someone over there is running a deliberate poaching motion, usually anchored by a former colleague who joined first and is now pulling their old teammates through. The platform team is the beachhead. Your move.
  1. Identify the likely anchor: who from the platform team joined Vantablue first, and who did they work closest with.
  2. Run stay conversations with the remaining team now, not at review season. Retention offers made before the resignation cost half as much and work twice as often.
  3. Fix what the flow is telling you; teams rarely leak in one direction unless compensation, tooling, or leadership drifted below market on that specific team.
  4. Brief your own recruiters: flows run both ways, and Vantablue has alumni too.
Automate it. Point the People Signals API at your own company and your named competitors, and review the flow map monthly with HR leadership. Attrition strategy stops being anecdote-driven. Why it lands. Most companies discover a poaching campaign at the fourth resignation. The signal shows you at the second, while the team still has a core worth keeping.

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How to read it

Competitive intel

Talent flow reveals which rivals are gaining ground.

Requires mapping

Needs a per-company or per-industry competitor list.

Context signal

More about market dynamics than direct intent.

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Outreach playbook

Competitive intelligence. Track which rivals are attracting your targets’ talent.

Employee Departed

A person left this company for another.

Talent Inflow from Company

A company hired multiple people from the same source company.

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