On November 19, 2025, Yann LeCun announced he was leaving Meta and would stay "until the end of the year." On December 18, he confirmed that he was executive chairman of a new company, AMI Labs. His work history now shows his Meta role ending in January 2026 and his AMI role starting the same month. AMI announced its official launch on March 10, 2026.
Those are four public dates for one job change. A CRM record that still lists him at Meta is out of date even though every one of them is easy to find.
Most contacts don't announce their moves in the news, and they move often. In August 2026, 2.11% of employed US workers moved to a new employer, according to the Philadelphia Fed. If your contacts move at that rate, a list of 500 would have about 10 people change employers every month.
This guide explains how to set up job change tracking for sales and customer success: which contacts to watch, seven checks to confirm a change is real before anyone reaches out, and what to do at both the new company and the account the person left.
What job change tracking means for sales and customer success
Job change tracking means checking, on a regular schedule, whether the people you already know still work where your CRM says they do. When someone moves, two things happen at once.
At the new company, you may have a warm way in. The person knows your product and may know your team. At the company they left, you may have lost the person who championed your product, and the account is now more exposed at renewal.
A job change gives you a reason to get in touch and a relationship to start from. Whether the person needs anything is something you find out in the conversation.
Choose the contacts worth tracking
Start with people whose relationship with you is worth following to a new company:
- Current customers, who champion your product and know it well.
- Power users, who use the product every day and can explain its value to a new team.
- Economic buyers, who signed or approved the contract.
- Closed-lost contacts, who liked the product but couldn't buy at the time.
- Former customers, who may have left for budget or timing reasons, not because of the product.
Keep the first list small enough that someone can review every flagged change by hand, such as the main contacts on your top accounts. For each contact, store a professional profile URL along with the name and email. The profile URL is what lets you look the person up again reliably.
Check where each contact works now
There are two ways to check a list with Enrich Layer.
For a quick, one-time check, the free Champion Tracker takes up to 25 profile URLs or work emails and shows each person's current employer and title. You enter your email to see more than the first five results. It doesn't save your list or check it again later. You compare its results with your CRM yourself.
For ongoing tracking, call the People API on a schedule you control, such as a weekly job. Each lookup returns the person's work history, including the company, company profile URL, title, start date, and end date for each role:
curl -G "https://enrichlayer.com/api/v2/profile" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $ENRICHLAYER_API_KEY" \
--data-urlencode "profile_url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/yann-lecun/"
Your job then compares each person's current roles with the account the CRM has for them and flags any mismatch for review. The schedule, the comparison, and the routing to account owners are steps you set up in your own system. If you're deciding between looking up known contacts and searching for new ones, the Search API vs. enrichment API guide explains when to use each.
A mismatch doesn't mean the person moved. Some tools count any difference between your CRM and a person's current profile as a job change, even when the move happened years ago. That's why every flag should go through the checks below before a rep acts on it.
Seven checks to run before anyone reaches out
Customer success teams already build this step into their playbooks. Step two of Gainsight's playbook for a departed sponsor includes "verify change." Run these checks on every flag before anyone acts on it.
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Confirm it's the same person. Compare the headline, location, and work history with what you know about the contact. Don't rely on the name alone. Many people share names, and a profile URL saved in a CRM can belong to someone other than the contact. The identity resolution guide covers matching people across sources in more depth.
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Match employers by company profile URL. Company names vary between systems, so "Acme" in your CRM and "Acme Inc." on a profile can look like two different employers. The company profile URL is a steadier key. Some roles don't link to a company profile, so check those by hand.
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Count the open roles. A role with no end date counts as current, and many people hold more than one at a time: a board seat, an advisory role, a side business, or a teaching post. By default, the current role with the most recent start date is listed first, and people can reorder their current roles. So the first role you see isn't always the main job. A new open role only means a move if the old main role has ended.
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Tell a title change from an employer change. A new title at the same company is a promotion or a reshuffle, and it calls for a different action from a move to a new employer. Watch for parent and subsidiary companies, where a new company name can appear without the person leaving the group.
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Read the dates for what they are. Profile dates are entered by the person and only record the month and year. Many people update their profile weeks or months after they start. The professional network's own economists count only timely updates in their hiring data "to control for the influence of members who change their profiles at later dates."
No study measures how long the typical delay is. Keep four dates apart: when the move was announced, when it took effect, what the profile says, and when you noticed. Never tell a rep that the date you noticed is the date the person moved.
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Look for a second signal on important contacts. For executives and key champions, check a press release, a news story, or the team pages of the old and new companies. If your own emails to the person's old work address have started to bounce, that's another sign they've left.
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Decide what to do with contacts you can't check. Some profiles are private or have been deleted. Put those contacts in a manual review queue instead of treating "no result" as "no change."
How the checks apply to Yann LeCun's move
Here's part of the work history the People API returned for Yann LeCun in October 2026:
{
"full_name": "Yann LeCun",
"headline": "Founder/Chair, AMI Labs - Prof, NYU - Partner, 224 Ventures",
"experiences": [
{
"company": "AMI - Advanced Machine Intelligence",
"company_linkedin_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/amilabs-xyz",
"title": "Executive Chairman",
"starts_at": { "day": 1, "month": 1, "year": 2026 },
"ends_at": null
},
{
"company": "New York University",
"company_linkedin_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/new-york-university",
"title": "Professor",
"starts_at": { "day": 1, "month": 9, "year": 2003 },
"ends_at": null
},
{
"company": "224 Ventures",
"company_linkedin_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/224-ventures",
"title": "Frontier AI Partner",
"starts_at": { "day": 1, "month": 8, "year": 2026 },
"ends_at": null
},
{
"company": "Facebook",
"company_linkedin_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/facebook",
"title": "VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta",
"starts_at": { "day": 1, "month": 10, "year": 2021 },
"ends_at": { "day": 31, "month": 1, "year": 2026 }
}
]
}
Run it through the checks:
- Same person. The headline names AMI Labs and NYU, which matches his public announcements.
- Employer match. The Meta role is listed under the company name "Facebook." A check that compares the name "Meta" in a CRM with this profile would not find a match. Comparing company profile URLs, or reviewing the role by hand, avoids that problem.
- Open roles. Three roles have no end date. The NYU professorship started in 2003 and continued through his time at Meta, so it's a long-running side role. The 224 Ventures role started in August 2026, months after the move. The change that matters for a CRM is the main employer: Meta ended and AMI started.
- Dates. The profile shows January 2026 for both the end of the Meta role and the start of the AMI role. The "day" values of 1 and 31 fill in the first and last day of the month and don't record an actual day. January 2026 isn't any of the announced dates. He announced the move in November, said he'd stay until the end of the year, and confirmed his title in December. No public source gives his actual last day at Meta, so a rep shouldn't name one.
- Second signal. His own posts and news coverage confirm the move.
The result is a confirmed employer change from Meta to AMI. If he were one of your contacts, you'd reach out to him at AMI and find someone new to work with at Meta.
A title change and a real move in one announcement
On August 5, 2026, Google published "The next chapter of our AI momentum," which announced two changes at once. Demis Hassabis stepped down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become its chair and Alphabet's chief scientist, and he continues to lead Isomorphic Labs. Jeff Dean is leaving to start his own company.
Both changes would show up as new titles. Only Dean's is a move to a new employer. Hassabis stays inside the same corporate group, even though a new company name, Alphabet, appears in his roles. Check 4 exists to separate these two cases.
Decide which changes matter
Once a change is confirmed, decide how much effort it deserves. Four things help rank changes:
- Relationship strength. A champion who ran your rollout is worth more than a contact who attended one demo.
- Fit of the new company. Check the new employer against your ideal customer profile: industry, size, and location. The guide to building a target account list covers the company data you can use for this.
- Role at the new company. A person who can influence a purchase is a better lead than one who can't, whatever their history with you.
- Time since the move. The more recent the move, the better your reason to get in touch. If you've only just noticed a move from years ago, update your CRM.
Act at the new company
Give the outreach to the rep who covers the new company. If the new company is already a customer, the account manager or customer success manager should lead, since the move may be an expansion opportunity.
Timing is a judgment call. Vendor playbooks suggest anything from the first few days to the second month. The common "first 90 days" idea comes from Michael Watkins' book The First 90 Days (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), which is about how new leaders handle a transition. The book doesn't say new leaders buy anything in that window. A sensible default is to wait until the person has settled in, while your shared history is still fresh.
Make the first message personal. Mention what you worked on together, ask about the new role, and offer something useful for the job they have now. Don't pitch in the first message. In your CRM, create a contact at the new company and link it to the old record, so the history of the relationship stays in one place.
Protect the account they left
Research from two studies shows why the account the person left needs attention too. A study of advertising agencies and their clients from 1986 to 1998 found that "the exit of managers from client firms increases the likelihood that market ties dissolve" (Broschak, Administrative Science Quarterly, 2004). A 1992 study of auditor-client relationships found that personal ties between the people on each side made clients less likely to switch.
Neither study looked at software companies, but both found that personal ties help hold business relationships together.
The customer success manager should own this side for current customers, and the account executive should own it for open deals. Act right away, well before the next renewal:
- Mark the contact as departed in the CRM.
- Find the person's replacement, or the next most senior person in the same team, and introduce yourself.
- Add at least one more contact at the account, so the relationship doesn't depend on a single person again.
- Review the renewal risk and bring the account into your next pipeline or health review.
- Agree on one owner for the account, so the follow-up doesn't fall between sales and customer success.
Measure what the program changes
Track a few numbers each month:
- Confirmed changes, and the share of flagged changes that turned out to be wrong when checked. A high share tells you to tighten the checks.
- Conversations started with contacts at their new companies, and the pipeline that came from them.
- Departed contacts replaced before the next renewal.
- Renewals at accounts that lost a contact, compared with your usual renewal rate.
To see whether tracking changes your results, set up a simple comparison. Each quarter, leave a small, random group of confirmed movers uncontacted, and compare their results with the group you contacted. People you already know tend to reply more than strangers do, whatever you do. Without a comparison group, you can't separate that effect from the effect of your outreach. We haven't seen vendors recommend this, but it's the most direct way to know whether the program is working.
Try it on your own contacts
Run 25 of your own champions through the free Champion Tracker and compare the results with your CRM. Then use the checks above on every mismatch. To check a larger list on a schedule, use the People API.
