Finding Talents by Industry
The Industry filter in Talent Signals helps you identify individuals based on the industries they are currently working in, have worked in, or are moving into.
Talent Signal now allows using Specter’s dual-lens industry classification.
More details here.
Where to Find It
Click Add Filter in Talent Signals
Go to Companies
Select Company Industry
How the Industry Filter Works
You can apply the Industry filter across different contexts:
Current + Past Industry: Find people who currently work at or have worked at companies in the selected industries
Current Only: Find people currently working at companies in the selected industries
Signal - New Position: Find people who recently joined companies in the selected industries (captures the trigger behind the signal)
Signal - Past Position: Find people who recently left companies in the selected industries for their next move.
Example: A New Company search filtered by AI & Machine Learning will surface founders building in this space.
Stealth Founders & Estimated Industries
When founders are in stealth, they often don’t disclose what they’re building. This means their company’s industry cannot be directly classified.
To address this, Talent Signals uses Estimated Industries—a predictive layer that infers a founder’s likely industry and tech vertical.
This is based on:
Past roles and companies
Current activity
Bio and stated focus
Any signals related to their new venture
If a founder explicitly states what they’re building, that is used directly. Otherwise, the system predicts the most likely industry based on their career footprint.
This allows you to get early directional context on stealth founders, even before anything is publicly announced.
You’ll see this in Talent Signals → Stealth Founders.
Estimated Industries helps you:
Quickly understand their likely focus area
Qualify relevance without guesswork
Best Practices
Use Current + Past Industry for broader discovery across a theme
Use Signal - New Position to track immediate movement into selected industries
Use Signal - Past Position to track signals triggered by exits from select industries
For stealth founders, estimated industries helps to capture profiles aligned with inferred areas of focus
Need to Go Deeper?
Want to build searches based on talent pools from specific:
Companies (e.g. ex-DeepMind founders)
Universities (e.g. Stanford, ETH Zurich)
Accelerators (e.g. Y Combinator, Entrepreneur First)
Get in touch with us: We can help configure founder-targeted searches based on background, not just industry.