Sixteen Techniques of Interest

I want to share sixteen tools and techniques that have impressed me in the last few months. They should be of interest to recruiters as well as OSINT people, I hope. Consider them to be techniques that you did not know you should use.

1. Outwit Hub is a veteran tool. And it is the only way to scrape your first-level connections along with email addresses without the need to script. Just scroll down your connections list and tell OH to get contacts under all links. It will manage about 7K records before slowing to a crawl; more if you have a large computer memory. Phantombuster will die much sooner on a free account. (No tool will “get” my 30K!)
   The latest OH version (8.0) has an auto-scroll feature as well. Be prepared for a bit of a rough UI though. The full lifetime version is under $100 – buy it. (I am not affiliated.)
2. Face recognition and search – https://pimeyes.com/. Works pretty well! Google’s reverse image search has become ridiculous, so we have been in need of a working replacement. (Google recruiters in the Image division: if you need help sourcing skilled Developers, I will do it for free. Please PM.)
   Yandex, however, as well as Pimeyes, does an excellent job since it recognizes faces. On both Pimeye and Yandex, you can take a selfie and they will find your online traces. You will be impressed. Pimeye, by the way, has removed image uploading, so you’d have to hold a photo close to the computer camera if it is not you.
   What is amusing with these tools is that they find people who look just like you, who you did not know existed! What was their life story?
3. Social List now has a Slideshare Agent! Anyone who has ever uploaded a document to LinkedIn has a Slideshare profile. Since Googlebot and LinkedIn public profiles are still at odds, this Agent gives you excellent filters. We use the Social List’s Contact Finder when we source.
4. chartloop.com builds org charts based on LinkedIn profiles. It is a cool, unique idea. The tool has ways to go. There is a lot more intelligence to be derived from LinkedIn’s Big Data. I think contact-finding should not be their priority but they need to market, so.
5. Ally from Include.ai (in Beta) has become my favorite scraper. (I rarely praise any tools that creators ask me to review.) But my feelings about the tool are ambivalent. I have wasted hours because of losing information without a way to return to it. If they improve the UX flow and error-handling, I will declare Ally the greatest tool of all time.
   No need to know HTML, out-of-the-box scrapers, easy way to set your own, dig into pages if you like. Sweet. It combines the best of Instant Data Scraper and DataMiner, plus adds power. (Funny, the founders were not aware of either.)
6. My friend Balazs has made the community happy by explaining how to source on Facebook again. (I just recommend putting “a” in the keywords, nothing else, to get maximum results. Try it and see if there is a difference.)
7. Phantombuster is very alive, “automating everything” as promised. You will not, however, get any significant volume of data for free.
8. ScrollBuddy – configurable autoscrolling.
9. https://webresolver.nl/tools/skype_to_email https://webresolver.nl/tools/email_to_skype – have not tested much but sound promising.
10. xlek.com – public records search.
11. Github email finder – finally!
12. Amazon advanced book search – do your candidates write books?
13. bearsofficialsstore.com – detailed scrapable lists of staff for a bunch of companies.
14. Translate text from images on the search results page with Yandex
15. Search for podcasts – Google does not have links for every specialized search on the home page.
16. Clustrmaps is a scrapable database of people info including email addresses. Make sure you verify the data though since it is far from perfect. (Which is to be expected from such a tool.)

How about you? Anything new and remarkable that you can share?