Job-change signal
A job-change signal is a trigger built from someone moving into a new role, where what makes it worth a send is the budget and mandate the role carries, not the fact that a title changed on LinkedIn.
A job change is a bet one person makes on a role, not a company-level event, and that distinction is the whole reason it needs its own playbook instead of getting lumped into a generic signal-based-outbound bucket. A title change on LinkedIn isn't the signal. It's just the event. The signal is what the new title comes with: budget authority, a stack the person didn't choose, and a mandate to show progress fast.
The mandate test
Ask what the person is now accountable for that they weren't before, and whether they have the authority to sign for something new to hit that mandate. A lateral move with the same title, scope, and reporting line rarely clears either bar, even though it triggers the same new-job alert as a real mandate change. If the answer to both questions is no, it's noise wearing a signal's outfit, not a job-change signal worth a send.
The window worth targeting isn't a specific day count; no vendor's number for how long a new hire stays in market survives asking for the methodology behind it. What's real is the shape of the role's early stretch: auditing what they inherited, deciding what to keep and replace, and building the internal case for change. That's the only stretch where the person is actively re-evaluating the stack instead of defending calls they've already made and defended internally.
In practice
The outreach that works references the mandate the role implies, not the title itself. A new VP of Sales almost certainly inherited a pipeline process someone else built and is under pressure to show it works or fix it. Reference that specifically, and run the mandate check plus an ICP check before a job-change trigger ever reaches scoring.
What people get wrong
Teams treat the title change on LinkedIn as the signal itself, when it's an event that may or may not come with the budget and authority that make it worth acting on. The tell is the template: 'Congrats on the new role at [Company]!' reads as a mail-merge field, not personalization, because it skips the one thing actually knowable about the person from the role alone, their likely mandate.
