Auditing and Editing Affiliations

Updated 4 months ago by Alexandra McIlraith

Before making manual edits to information, it is advisable to use DotAlign's audit tools to investigate existing information first.

Auditing an Affiliation

DotAlign gathers affiliations - such as current or past jobs held, and potentially even schools attended - from a number of sources, including your contact cards, emails, calendar events, and information supplied by colleagues. While automatic systems such as DotAlign are useful, they sometimes make mistakes. Auditing is a useful tool to help you investigate and better determine the trustworthiness of any unexpected or missing information. Affiliations, like all automatically collected contact information in the DotAlign app, can be audited to see relevant information surrounding it.

To investigate a person's affiliations, go to the GET/api/personjobs/{personId} endpoint and specify the person whose affiliations you'd like to investigate by providing one of their emails (or another valid identifier) as the input for personId. You will also need to specify which team context you are investigating the person in; this is usually "1", but may be a different number if your DotAlign deployment has multiple teams.

The API response will include:

  • Information about how many organizations the person has been affiliated with
  • The name of each organization the person has been associated with
  • For each organization, the latest position held (if known) and the company alias found alongside that job title, as well as the seniority level of that job title (where that can be inferred)
  • For each organization, a timestamp of when DotAlign last encountered evidence of the association; if the person is believed to no longer be at the organization, there will also be a flag to that effect
  • For each organization, a score reflecting how much influence the contributors in a team have with the organization via that person (based on factors such as the person's seniority and how likely it is that they are currently associated with that firm)

Removing an Affiliation

Before removing an affiliation, consider whether a different edit may be more appropriate.

For example, perhaps a person has similar affiliations at a company that has rebranded; the better solution would be to merge those company records.

Another example could be that an incorrect email address was entered for a person on a message, meeting, or contact card; removing that data that would also resolve the inferred affiliation, and would be more efficient than making both edits separately.

Although it is rare that an affiliation should be removed directly, it is sometimes necessary. For example, someone may have created an inaccurate contact card, or perhaps a consultant was given an email address at your firm as part of an engagement, but never was an actual employee of your firm.

To remove an affiliation, go to the POST /api/personjobs/{personId} endpoint and specify the person whose affiliation you'd like to remove by providing one of their emails (or another valid identifier) as the input for personId, as well as the name of the company you wish to dissociate them from. Make sure to set the "NeverWorkedHere" boolean to true.

Updating an Affiliation

There are several different scenarios in which you might wish to update an affiliation for a person:

  1. You might wish to record that the person is no longer at the firm/associated with the organization
  2. You might wish to confirm the affiliation is current as of today, or otherwise update the affiliation to show as being current as of some other point in time
  3. You might wish to update the person's job title at the organization, for example if their signature block doesn't include this information

To make any of these updates, go to the POST /api/personjobs/{personId} endpoint and enter an email address (or other valid identifier) for the person, as well as the name of the company the affiliation is with.

To mark the affiliation as former/no longer current, set the "IsCurrent" boolean to false; you will also need to use the "DaysAgoBelievedToStillWorkHere" field to specify the latest date the person is known to have been at the firm. To confirm the affiliation as being current as of today, set the "IsCurrent" boolean to true. If you'd like to update how recently someone is believed to have been at a firm - without opining on whether they are still there today - you can do so by using the "DaysAgoBelievedToStillWorkHere" field (make sure to leave "IsCurrent" empty!).

Make sure to leave "NeverWorkedHere" as false whenever the person has ever been associated with the firm - whether marking an affiliation as former or updating it (or even adding a new one).

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