agent congratulated a lead on their new role at a company they left 8 months ago - the LinkedIn headline was stale...

TL;DR

A job-change congratulation needs two things: a second source and a date. Never personalize off a single headline with no timestamp. Confirm the role against another signal, like the company page or a recent post, and confirm the change is actually recent before you congratulate anyone on it. Congratulating someone on an 8-month-old move tells them your research is 8 months old, which is worse than no personalization at all.

agent congratulated a lead on their new role at a company they left 8 months ago  -  the LinkedIn headline was stale and nothing flagged it

Steps

1. Require a date on every job-change signal. A headline with no timestamp is not a job change, it's a rumor, and it doesn't go into an email.

Expected: a signal with no date is excluded from personalization and logged as undated.

1. Confirm the role with a second source before personalizing: the company's team page, a recent post from the lead, or a second data provider. One source is a hint; two is a fact.

Expected: the email only mentions the role when two sources agree on the current employer.

1. Define 'recent' explicitly, like within the last 90 days, and congratulate only inside that window. Outside it, the move is old news and mentioning it is creepy, not flattering.

Expected: a 6-month-old move is excluded from congratulation copy by the recency rule.

1. When sources disagree or the date is unclear, drop the congratulation line. A missing first line is invisible; a wrong one is memorable.

Expected: a conflicted signal sends the email without the job-change line, and the lead never knows.

1. Log every job-change personalization with its sources and dates, so a wrong congratulation can be traced to the exact signal that caused it.

Expected: the log shows which source and date backed each congratulation, making the next fix obvious.

Use this when

• personalization is built on a single headline with no date attached
• job-change congratulations are going out and some of them are wrong
• you need a recency rule for role-change signals

Not for this skill when

• a company that shut down entirely (that's a liveness problem)
• funding rounds quoted without dates (that's a date-required problem on a different fact)
• tech-stack claims from enrichment (that's a claim-verification problem)

Variant phrasings

• agent congratulated lead on a new role at a company they left months ago
• stale headline used for personalization, no recency check on job change
• first line referenced an old job, single-source signal with no date

Why it happens

The headline was the only source, it had no usable date, and nothing checked either. Headlines go stale when people don't update them, providers cache them, and caches get served as current. The agent treated a stale cached headline as a fresh job change because the pipeline had no rule that said a job change needs a date and a second source.

Edge cases

• people with two concurrent roles can look like they changed jobs; confirm which role is primary before congratulating
• internal promotions look like job changes in some providers; congratulating a promotion is fine, but the copy should match the reality
• a lead who just left the company is often the worst person to email about it; consider suppressing recent-departure leads from the sequence entirely
• dates in different formats and timezones can make a recent change look old; normalize dates before applying the recency rule

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_ycCEuT1lqmTmm4WeIg3K8g