I find it to be incredibly productive, as part of the sourcing process, to Google for email addresses (in the quotation marks). It’s particularly useful to Google an email address of someone whom you believe to be a fit for the opening you are trying to fill, an “ideal” candidate.
Here is what we can achieve by searching for an email address of an “ideal” candidate:
- Find additional professional background and contact information for that person.
- Find online lists in which the person is included – and which can potentially contain names and contact information of others “like” her.
- Find lists “like” the one where the person was included, by X-Raying the site where a list that we have already found
- is hosted.
- Find sites where the person has some sort of presence (like an online profile, or bio, or even a resume) and X-Ray the site that hosts that profile/bio/resume for more people “like” him.
(We can certainly also Google the person’s name with the same purposes in mind. But searching for an email address is helpful in the sense that it will almost never have “false positives” since an email address is unique for every person.)
There is nothing earth-shaking about the considerations above – it is a common-sense approach. I am posting this as a suggestion for those who haven’t practiced looking for emails – and a reminder to expand and vary your searches. It is also a reminder to examine search results for any useful information that you can utilize in following searches.
Do you Google for candidates? Do you use many sites other than LinkedIn for Sourcing? (Believe me, many Recruiters don’t).
Come join me on Wednesday, January 16th, 2019 for our historically most popular webinar – “Sourcing without LinkedIn”.