If we know someone’s name, company, and email format(s) used at the company, chances are that we could construct that business email address. Here are some ways to figure out the email format(s) specific companies are using.

1. Collections of Formats

Online collections of corporate email formats have been shared across our groups. I will list some of them here; please feel free to suggest other sites in the comments. Of course this information needs to be verified.

• Email Format
• Emails4Corporations
• Executivebomb.com
• Emailnamefinder
• Ceoemail.com

There is a collection of email formats, phone numbers, and more for the Fortune 1000 companies that I ran across, that can be found by Googling. Here is the file; I am not sure how precise the info is but this may be a good start.

2. Googling for Examples

When I search for a company email pattern, I pretty much never look them up in the sources like the above. I find it easier to do a few Google searches like this:

“email OR contact me at * bankofamerica.com”
“email OR contact me at * autodesk.com”

Here is a variation of this “Googling” method, using X-Raying LinkedIn. I am omitting “me“, compared to the searches above, since I expect to mostly see emails for people (vs. “info” “sales” “support” etc.) on LinkedIn profiles:

linkedin.com “people you know” “email * * apple.com”
linkedin.com “people you know” “email * * sap.com”

Please note that Google is still behaves pretty badly with Captcahs. If you do advanced searching using X-raying and asterisks, you may want to switch to a custom search engine I have created for this purpose. It is available here on the blog, or use its public URL.

3. Guessing and Verifying

Check the post from 2013:

Find Almost Anybody’s Email Address with #LinkedIn

4. Use This Custom Search Engine – Reveal Email Formats

This Custom Engine is based on a well-known site Zoominfo, that contains contact information, found on the Internet. To use the search engine, enter a company domain name, as an example, chevron.com, into the search box, and see what happens.

You can use its public link or just search below:

Reveal Email Formats

Here are some cool examples of its usage (Scroll down on each of these pages to see the results):

Emails for GE.com
Emails for Dell.com
Emails for Pfizer.com

Another “back door” to LinkedIn has just been shut, breaking the “PYMK” (people you may know)-based link, breaking the bookmarklet shared on Sourcecon.com, a tool posted on Sourcing Hacks, and the hint in the “Hidden Names Discovery” post.

There’s a workaround.

Step 1. Save the profile to your contacts:

Step 2. Take a look at the newest person in your contacts.

Note that if you click on the name in the contacts you will see the full profile. The information hidden in the original view is shown.

That’s it! Let’s see how long this will last. 🙂

Interestingly, if you Google a phrase from a person’s profile, when the person is out of your network, the profile will show in full even in a logged-in view. (Try it.) But if the person you have found on Google is your 3rd level connection, it’s best to view his profile in an incognito window.

As a Dice subscriber, I couldn’t miss the note from Dice CEO Shravan Goli “Dice’s Open Web is coming out of Beta”.

Dice’s Open Web technology is one of the pioneers among people aggregators, the new generation sourcing tools, initially developed as theSocialCV. (See more tools in the people aggregator category listed on the Tools page.) Dice certainly showed innovative ways of thinking, being the first job board to acquire a profile aggregation tool and to integrate with it.

I have run a few experimental searches and here is what it was like.

1) The traditional Dice resumes are now showing the “Open web” part, that is associated with the majority of them.

While, if we have a full resume with the contact information, it’s not a problem to find several profiles, the new Dice UI saves some of that sourcing legwork and shows links to social profiles and a preview of the professional info right in the resume view:

Clearly, this is useful.

2) If you have a Dice account with Open Web access and are logged in, you can take advantage of the Chrome add-on while you browse the Social web outside of Dice. Several other people aggregators (Entelo, Talentbin, and Gild, to name a few) have similar add-ons.

Here’s what it looks like. From this example you may notice that the Dice Open Web repository has some profiles in its collection as well that are not in the IT field in its narrow definition.

Of course, seeing info in the pop-up window is a hit-or-miss, depending whether Dice has the given profile among the aggregated data, but it is useful info when it’s there.

3) Then, of course, there’s search within the aggregated profile database itself. The search UI is now integrated between the resumes and the Open web.

If you try the Open web for the first time, you may see some “false positives” in the results. Don’t let this discourage you; that is to be expected of any people aggregator.   The expectations for searching in an aggregated profiles database (Dice’s or any other) should be different from searching in a resume database. The volume is larger, but it’s a more challenging task to glue pieces of distributed profiles together and to allow to search among them, compared to working with a resume DB. (With Google searches you can find even more, but it’s even harder to control the search!) If some good results are found with little effort, we are in luck.

I have noticed that the location search has greatly improved in Dice Open Web, compared to the last time I used it. It’s certainly critical in the geographical areas like my own; around Berkeley anything over 10 miles is a tough commute.

Bottom line, Dice is a promise of an integrated recruiting environment, where searching in the resume database and on the open web coexist and are nicely integrated.

Starting in 2014 the Open Web add-on is becoming paid; if fact, if you call them today, that would already be the case. That is perfectly reasonable since the Open Web adds searching power. Best of luck to Dice on educating its existing users on the advantages of the Open web and acquiring new users in the New Year.

Join me for a webinar on December 19, 2013. Seating is limited.

This newly designed class covers all of the basic concepts, technologies, and tips for those who search for professionals on the Internet. It will provide you with as many essential Google Boolean Strings, LinkedIn hacks, sourcing productivity tools, and all things related, as can be squeezed into a 90-minute webinar.

The webinar is based on, and can serve as an introduction, to the materials in the People Sourcing Certification Program. Those webinar attendees, who sign up for the upcoming round of the Program, will get the cost of this intro webinar returned to them.

Who should attend?

– Those who have never taken classes in sourcing but do search for professionals, or manage those who do

– Those who source as part of their jobs and want to be efficient in sourcing without necessarily becoming experts or doing anything “too technical”

– Those who want to get an up-do-date tour of the modern sourcing tools and methods

– Teams and managers who have been considering signing up for the People Sourcing Certification Program

What You Will Get:

Attendees will be able to acquire hands-on tips to boost their productivity, to get a sense of what modern Sourcing is about, and to practice the material during the month of follow-up support.

For those who already have a foundation in sourcing technologies, the webinar can serve as a refresher and as an update on things and tools that may have shifted since you last looked or last took a class – and things change incredibly often now!

Attention Managers: The webinar is a nice Holiday gift to your team members who are curious about sourcing and are ready to use new sourcing tools and hacks in their practice.

(Please note: if you have already signed up for the upcoming Certification Program in 2014, the webinar is free for you to attend.)

Date: Thursday, December 19, 2013

Time: 9 AM PST/noon EST/5 PM London

Duration: 90 minutes

Price: $99 – includes the slides, the video-recording, and one month of support.

Cant’s make the date and time? No worries; we will provide you with the complete materials and the month of support if you sign up.

(Please note: if you have already signed up for the upcoming Certification Program in 2014, the webinar is free for you to attend.)

When Google feels like our queries are too complex and suspects that they are sent by a robot, it throws a captcha  (a squiggly word with a box below it). This supposedly protects Google from being misused by non-humans, i.e. computer programs, that may find and scrape too much information too quickly.

If you are a human presented with a captcha, Google recommends to take a few actions. Unfortunately, in practice, this doesn’t help a whole lot.

Here is what usually does help, at least makes things easier: cleaning cookies; using a different browser; rebooting your Internet connection; or simply waiting a few minutes. There’s no 100% solution that would stop the Google.com search from questioning our humanity once and forever. Filling out an occasional capture is no big deal.

Unfortunately, about 2 or 3 weeks ago, mid-November 2013, the Google capchas’ behavior towards humans has worsened. Not only they appear quickly and often for those of us who use advanced operators like inurl:, the asterisk, and the numrange. It has a new behavior. Filling out a captcha doesn’t let us see the results; instead we are sent back to the empty Google search. Thus any search activity is stalled for a while. These posts: on our LinkedIn group, on Twitter, and on the general Google search forum are just a few reports about this.

I experienced a captcha attack first-hand while preparing the fun “Boolean Solved” presentation.

So, while the anti-bot war is going on in unreasonable ways, here is a sure way to search like a person, not a bot: use Google custom search engines. Captchas seem to leave those alone. With this in mind, I have created the very simple “Search .com” search. Use the link – or search here:

Search .com Domains

I have also created just a slightly more complex custom search engine that searches across .com, .org, .edu and many more domains. Use this link: Google No-Captchas or access this CSE in the Search Engine list.

I am not quite ready to start using Bing as my default search engine…

The Skills page has been removed. But skills are present in LinkedIn, not just on members’ profiles but also on some other pages. That could be useful for sourcing.

Company pages may list skills that their employees have, even along with the numbers of people with a particular skill.

University pages show skill that their University grads have:

This is shown on the second page, which is often missed; you can get there simply by clicking on the arrow icon on the Alumni search page.

You can also find the list of “suggested” skills by using this (secret) link. (Replace “a” with any letter you like). On this blog the author has tried to list all the skills on LinkedIn using the link; it turns out, there’s about 50K skills. Unfortunately, the skills suggested when you use the link are not related to any “target” profile; these are the skills that show up when you try to write an endorsement for a fellow member.

There have been complaints that the former Skills page offered a great opportunity to search for relevant skills. I have seen multiple blog posts and  questions on groups. on how to “get there” now that the skills page is gone; here are some: LinkedIn Skills Alternatives (oh yeah, it’s now “turned off”, sorry.) ; Finding Keywords for Recruiters ; Sourcing for Synonyms: Alternatives to the LinkedIn Skills Tool;

However, we still can find relevant skills using LinkedIn. Here are some examples of relevant skills lists that I got this morning, using a basic account (the bolded term is to what I am listing related skills):

Financial Analysis: Financial Modeling, Finance, Microsoft Excel, Financial Reporting, Forecasting, Budgets, Portfolio Management, Investments, Risk Management, Accounting, Analysis, Corporate Finance, Strategic Financial Planning, Banking, Strategic Planning, Valuation, Microsoft Office, Process Improvement, Credit, PowerPoint, Credit Analysis, Loans, Mergers & Acquisitions

Java: JavaScript, SQL, C++, XML, Linux, HTML, MySQL, C#, C, Agile Methodologies, Microsoft SQL Server, Python, CSS, Eclipse, Databases, Unix, Software Engineering, Web Services, PHP, Perl, jQuery, Core Java, Java Enterprise Edition

Radiology:  Hospitals, Healthcare, Clinical Research, Healthcare Management, EMR, Patient Safety, Healthcare Information Technology, Medicine, Medical Imaging, BLS, PACS, Surgery, Inpatient, Pediatrics, HIPAA, Critical Care, Cpr Certified, Nursing, EHR, ACLS, Medical Education, Medical Terminology, Ultrasound 

You can do some research and find the way to do this (it’s not a technical “hack” at all, no special access to LinkedIn or special technical knowledge is necessary) – or attend my webinar on LinkedIn that I will be repeating on Thursday and learn how to do this, along with many other tips that I will be sharing. As always, the webinar comes with one month of support.

Due to the strong demand from those who missed it on November 8th, a special repeat live session of this webinar is scheduled for Thursday, November 21st!

LinkedIn doesn’t easily let you search beyond your network; it requests the searches to be narrowed down by keywords if you want to do that. The same is true for paid accounts, including Recruiter. However…

I was able to do a search (today, 11/15/2013) and see the LinkedIn member numbers by country for all the major countries, the ones with a code abbreviation.

Here are the results (and a screenshot below) –

–Irina

It was a pleasure delivering the free “Boolean Solved” webinar, sponsored by HiringSolved, yesterday. We had a huge number of people – 1,057 people signed up! – from 39 countries:

AE, AR, AU, BE, BR, BY, CA, CH, CN, CO, CZ, DE, DK, EC, ES, FR, GB, GH, HU, IE, IL, IN, IT, NL, PH, PK, PL, RO, RU, SA, SG, SZ, UA, UG, US, UZ, VN, YE, ZA.

Wow.

70% of people came from the US. Job titles ranged from Recruiter to VP of Talent.

The night before Google was not cooperating, throwing more captcha’s than usual. I got pretty nervous and prepared the demo search windows ahead of time. During the presentation I had to pick the right window out of about 40; managed OK, though a few more monitors would have been helpful. 🙂

Here is an example search from the webinar, where I was explaining how we should be searching for “what we expect to find”, or “how others would phrase what we want to find”, or simply, that it helps to

Visualize Success:

By the way, it is pretty easy, once you start thinking this way. Let me illustrate this. Suppose we are looking for a list of professionals with contact info. We are going to find people’s names, titles, email domains, etc.

Instead of:
lists of management consulting professionals

or, even, instead of:
list name title company phone management consultant

we would do better if think about what we are likely to find in a “good” result:

1. names; how about: Mary Pat John James
2. titles; like “Senior” manager… accountant… etc.
3. company names, like  deloitte accenture
4. phone numbers; how about area codes 913 OR 785 OR 620 OR 316 as an example.

Now, try these searches and you will see how much more successful the search gets:

Mary Pat John James deloitte accenture mckinsey senior 319 515 712

How about this:

“deloitte.com” “accenture.com” senior 319 515 712

Of course, these are only sample searches. Bu they do illustrate the concept very well.

P.S. Every Sourcer sourcer should also learn how to do a barrel roll.

Did you know that not all LinkedIn search fields accept Boolean AND-OR-NOT expressions and some have different syntax than searching by keywords? Understanding the correct syntax is critical is executing searches and interpreting the search results.

This is a quick overview of the variations in the supported search syntax in LinkedIn search dialogs. The three syntax variations are:

1. Boolean search, supporting AND (implied), OR, and NOT, quotation marks for phrases, and parentheses for grouping statements
2. Search based on typing in some characters that prompt for the possible variations to be displayed and selected: “prompt search”
3. Search by a sub-string (non-Boolean): “sub-string search”

The Advanced search offers Boolean search in the fields on the left and “prompt search” in some of the other text-based fields.

The advanced dialog gives us a choice of Boolean search and prompt-search for the company names.  Clearly, each way of searching has its advantages.

The Boolean search syntax on LinkedIn is documented in a LinkedIn Tip Sheet (nicely formatted but, unfortunately, with several syntax errors in it – try to find them!)

The Find Alumni dialog offers “prompt search” in the locations, companies, and a few more fields, and Boolean search in the keyword section:

The search in Contacts is by sub-strings: below, you can see that the search for “bu” brings up both “business” and “buyer” in the titles.

For the advanced LinkedIn user, here’s a tricky question: what would the search for “university OR college” in the name of a school locate? See the screenshot below:

Are you aware of all the differences and opportunities provided in LinkedIn search dialogs? Do you use X-raying in Google to complement your LinkedIn searches? Come to my webinar this coming Friday to get a comprehensive overview of all the searching capabilities and taking advantage of them in your search for targeted professionals.

The first person to email me the correct answer to the “tricky question” above (explain how you got the answer) will get a free pass to the webinar.