finding candidate contact details

This week’s webinar is all about making contact. All too often you make find the perfect candidate profile but don’t have an email address or phone number. My webinar gave a range of techniques and useful tools to help solve this problem.

Before continuing, it has been pointed out that my really useful technique for contacting people on LinkedIn doesn’t quite work as I have described it. Apparently the people at Linkedin found out about what I was doing and plugged the loophole. I will be working on an update to this post to give a few more techniques that I hope will solve this problem.

LinkedIn doesn’t like recruiters

More and more Linkedin is limiting the information it will give you about the people you find. To get good information, you need to be directly connected but Linkedin are also trying to make it difficult for you to connect.

When searching on LinkedIn moving from the search results to view peoples profiles, LinkedIn works as follows

1st-degree connections
The full profile is visible, send messages, see the email or other contact details.

2nd-degree connections
See most of the profile, can’t send messages (only InMail, which LI charge for) can’t see contact details such as email addresses.

3rd-degree connections
Can’t see their full name, can’t send messages, can’t invite them to connect, can see any email or other contact details.

Profiles outside of your network are even further limited.

However, LinkedIn does allow you to send messages to 1st, 2nd 3rd and group connections. To see this, go to a group and hover over the name of someone posting to the group. In this circumstance, Linkedin does allow you to message and send invite connections.

In my webinar, I demonstrate another method to message 1st, 2nd, 3rd and group connections by knowing their ID this is also a very useful way to message people when LinkedIn is trying to make life difficult for you.
Be careful with inviting people to connect, if too many of them say they do not know you LinkedIn will block you from inviting anyone else without their email address.

Google Search

There are a range of Boolean search strings for finding email addresses and other information. Here is one from Martin Lee
site:uk.linkedin.com “qualified accountant” (email | gmail | co.uk | com | hotmail) -dir -~jobs
Type it into Google and see what happens. Martin also recommends using http://eel.surf7.net.my/ which is a great way to strip out the email addresses from the result. I also like Outwit Hub which does the same thing.

The problem with Google Search for email addresses, however is that the person you are looking for may not have their email address on the internet where Google can find it.  Very often however the email address of the person you are looking for will be reasonably obvious.  If you know their employers’ domain (eg intel-sw.com) then their email address is likely to be of the same format as everyone else in that company.

Once you guess an email address then http://www.verifyemailaddress.org/ is one of many email verification sites that can check your best guess. I also use LinkedIn as In-Group invites will let you know if this email address relates to a LinkedIn profile.

Call people

Skype has 663 million registered users at September 2011. OK, Facebook has 845 million but Skype is still a good bit bigger than the population of the USA. Skype also allows you to search for and message/call people simply by knowing their names. Skype seems very underutilized in the recruitment space and this seems to be a missed opportunity.

Google Plus

All profiles are relatively new and therefore up to date, the information is easily searchable and Google Plus has no problem giving you all the contact information they have. Google Plus is a fantastic resource for recruiters. Google Plus has not achieved the stickyness of Facebook (people spend a whole lot more time on FB than GP) but it is a wonderful resource to find contact details.

A simple x-ray search of Google Plus is
site:plus.google.com “Occupation * * Recruitment Consultant”

To round off the webinar I mention other useful sites such as PIPL, ZoomInfo and Plaxo.

Google Image Search


Finally, for a bit of fun, try the Google image search. https://www.google.com/imghp Upload a photo and Google will find sites on the internet where that image appears. This is a great way to link social profiles. It is also fascinating to discover that Google thinks I look like Arnold Schwarzenegger!!

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