Do I need UserGems, or will a public-source signal layer cover job changes?
If the job is knowing when the people who already bought from you land somewhere new, buy a tool built on a maintained people graph. That is what UserGems and its category do: they track a roster of contacts across employers continuously and tell you when one moves. Intakra does not track people at all: no people graph, no job-change feed, no scraping of professional networks. It works at the account level, so it is the wrong purchase for that job and we would rather say so than sell you a near-miss.
What public sources show is the other half of the same event, from the company's side. When someone is appointed into a role, the hiring company often discloses it: a newsroom post, a job posting that stops appearing, or for public issuers an 8-K disclosure of an officer appointment or departure. That is a real, dated, citable job-change signal on the account. It is account-level rather than person-level, it covers people you have never met as well as people you have, and it is blind to the private moves a people graph is built to catch.
Two different objects called job-change
The word covers two things that behave nothing alike. A people graph is a roster you carry: a set of individuals you care about, watched over time, so that a move is detected on the person. Public-source coverage is the reverse: you watch a market of companies, and a move surfaces when a company says something about a role changing. The first is high-precision about people you already know and blind to everyone else. The second is broad across a market and silent about the mid-level manager who quietly moved and never appeared anywhere public.
| Row | Situation | A people graph | Public sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Your champion from a closed-won deal moves to a new company | This is the core case. Detected on the person, usually within weeks. | Only if the new employer says something public about the appointment. Often silent. |
| 02 | A public company names a new CFO or other officer | Detected, if that person is on your roster. | Detected regardless. Officer appointments and departures are disclosed, dated, and citable from the filing. |
| 03 | A private company announces a new VP into a function you sell | Detected, if that person is on your roster. | Detected when the company posts it, or inferred from the posting closing plus a newsroom mention. |
| 04 | A senior manager moves and nobody announces it | Detected. This is the gap public sources will never close. | Not detected. There is no public artifact to read. |
| 05 | A function is being staffed up before a leader is named | Nothing to see yet, there is no move. | Visible as a hiring cluster on public job boards, which is often the earlier signal. |
| 06 | A company cuts a team and the work moves to someone else | Silent unless a roster contact is affected. | Visible in layoff notices and in the company statements around them. |
What Intakra actually checks
Being specific is the only way this kind of page is worth anything, so here are the sources, named. For the accounts on your list, Intakra reads SEC EDGAR filings, including 8-K disclosures and Form D notices of exempt offerings. It reads government contract data from USAspending, including contract end dates. It reads state layoff notices (WARN notices). It reads public job posts on Greenhouse, Ashby, and Lever. It checks the company's own web pages for changes. And it reads two technical records: DNS, which shows which email and web services a company's domain points to, and certificate logs, which show when a company sets up a new web address.
- SEC filings carry the cleanest executive-change evidence that exists, because officer appointments and departures at public issuers are a disclosable item with a date attached.
- Job boards are the leading indicator of the same event. A cluster of reqs in one function usually precedes the leader being named into it by weeks.
- WARN notices are the mirror image: the work did not disappear, the people doing it did, and somebody is now absorbing it.
- Federal award data is the least-used public source in outbound and the most concrete, because it comes with a dollar figure and a period of performance.
- A company's own leadership and newsroom pages fill some of the gap for private companies that file nothing.
None of those are a people database. They are company disclosures that happen to be about people sometimes, which is a meaningfully different thing to buy and a meaningfully different thing to trust.
The champion case, honestly
Intakra does not have a champion watch and does not track individual people. That is a deliberate boundary: it works at the account level, from public sources about companies, and holds no contact data. If a new leader is disclosed publicly, for example in an 8-K, it shows up as proof on the account, not as a person you are following.
So the honest split is simple. If champion moves are where most of your deals come from, a dedicated people-graph tool is the right purchase and Intakra is not a substitute. If you also want to know when accounts on your list start a project, whoever is in the seat, that is the job Intakra does, and the two run side by side.
How to decide
- Count your alumni
How many people have bought from you, championed you, or run a real evaluation with you? If the number is in the hundreds, a people graph has something to work with and probably pays for itself. If it is in the dozens, it does not yet.
- Check whether your wins follow people
In some categories the buyer carries the vendor to the next company, and in others the decision is institutional. If your last three wins came from someone who had used you before, that is how you win, and you should fund it properly.
- Separate net-new from follow-the-person
Champion tracking works your past. Market-wide public sources work accounts you have never touched. They are different pipelines with different owners, and a team that needs both should be honest that it is two line items.
- Test coverage before you buy either
Hand any vendor a list of twenty moves you already know about and count the hits. Do this before the demo shapes your expectations. It is the only benchmark that is about your market rather than theirs.
The uncomfortable answer for a small team is that if you can only fund one, you should fund the one that matches where your deals actually come from, and most small teams have never checked.
This is what the category calls job-change signals and champion tracking.
Champion tracking, alumni tracking, and job-change intelligence all name the same play: maintain a roster of people who already trust you, watch where they land, and reach out early in the new role while they still have latitude to bring in what worked before. It is one of the few outbound plays with a real causal story behind it rather than a correlation.
Trigger-event or buying-signal software names the market-wide version: watch companies rather than people, and act on dated public developments. Executive appointments appear in both worlds, which is why the categories get compared, but they arrive through different plumbing and fail in opposite directions. Comparing them on the executive-change row alone will mislead you about both.
Questions people ask next
Does Intakra track job changes?
No. It records executive appointments and departures only when a company discloses them publicly, and only as proof on that account. It does not follow individuals, keep a champion roster, or hold contact data, so it is not a substitute for a tool that does.
Could you not just scrape LinkedIn for this?
No, and Intakra does not. Scraping a professional network is against its terms, and building a pipeline on an access path that can be cut is a poor foundation for something your quarter depends on. The public sources here are public because a rule or a company decision made them public.
What is the strongest job-change signal available publicly?
An officer appointment or departure disclosed by a public issuer, because it is dated, attributable, and verifiable against the filing itself. For private companies, the strongest available proxy is usually a hiring cluster in one function followed by the company announcing the leader, which you can see on their own job board.
If we run both, how do they divide?
Champion tracking owns your past: people who already trust you, wherever they went. A public-source layer owns the market you have not touched. Keep them as separate queues with separate owners. Merging them into one list means the highest-conviction outreach you have competes for attention with net-new research, and net-new usually wins on volume.
Where to check this yourself
Primary records and published research, not vendor blog posts. Every link was checked on September 1, 2026.
- UserGemsusergems.com
The vendor's own description of job-change and champion tracking, worth reading first-hand rather than through a comparison page.
- SEC, Form 8-Ksec.gov
The current-report form that carries officer appointment and departure disclosures, which is why executive changes at public issuers are dated and public.
- SEC EDGAR full-text searchsec.gov
Search filing text directly to confirm an appointment or departure against the primary record.
- US Department of Labor, WARN Actdol.gov
The federal notice requirement behind state layoff notice lists, the public source for work moving off one team onto another.
- USAspending.govusaspending.gov
Federal award data with dollar values and periods of performance, one of the public sources read alongside filings and job boards.
Intakra watches public sources for the companies on your list: job posts, SEC filings, government contracts, layoff notices and company website changes. It works at the account level and does not track people.
14 days on 150 accounts, no card