Tools

Here is a list of some favorite Sourcing, Internet Research, and Social Recruiting Tools and Resources.

For a 90-minute lecture on Productivity Tools please check out the Sourcing Tools Webinar (one month of support is included). Additionally, Web Scraping for Recruiters covers scrapers, and Become a Custom Search Engines Expert, CSEs.

Organize Add-ons in Chrome

• Extensity

Media-Related  

• Google Advanced Image Search (use for the “face” and “photo” options)
• “Image Match” on Bing
• Reverse Image Search on Yandex
• Search by Image (Google, Bing, Yandex & others)
• Pimeyes – reverse image search with face recognition
• Youtube Metadata

Scroll

• Autopagerize
• ScrollBuddy

Web Content

• Evernote – capture and organize content from the web

Writing

• Grammarly (love it!)
• Idea Generator

Checking job posts

• Textio  (subscription)
• Jobint
• Gender Decoder

Scraping, Parsing, Filtering, and Sorting

• Outwit Docs – download files from a search
• Outwit Hub – an application. It parses and collects data on web pages with lists of similar entries, has good intelligence (but get a fast computer)
• Email Extractor – paste text in the box, extract email addresses
• Email Extractor/Collector Chrome Add-On – EmailExtractor
• Scraper  – get data out of pages into spreadsheets
• Instant Data Scraper by Webrobots.io – does a really good job out-of-the-box
• Data Miner – scraper with a visual UI
• PhantomBuster – scrapers for LinkedIn and Facebook and various automation scripts
• Ally – include.ai Sidebar – Beta quality but great functionality
• ScrapeStorm – downloadable, highly configurable app
• LinkedIn Helper – automation tool; works as a nice scraper (trial, subscription)
• Dux-Soup – – automation tool; works as a scraper (subscription)
• SocialList.io – find and export lists of Social Profiles exactly matching your requirements, such as a job title or company. Has a Contact Finder. Monthly subscription, one-week trial  
• SQL query generator – get detailed info on StackoverFlow users

Social Lookup

• Contact+ – an add-on for Gmail, showing social profiles. Their online app allows to upload and cross-reference lists of email addresses and social contacts
• Clearbit – similar to Contact++
• GlossaryTech – highlights and explains technical terms on a profile
• OctoHR – shows the programming languages for a user on Github
• Intelligence_X OSINT Tools
• Mobile-friendly page test – allows you to see public LinkedIn profiles in incognito

Lookup & Contact Info

• Hunter – has a database of email addresses found on the web (and it tells us where!), predicts email addresses based on the database
• https://phonebook.cz – get long random lists of emails at companies

• EmailOnGithub – what it says
• ContactOut – LinkedIn
• Lusha – LinkedIn
• Nymeria -LinkedIn
• SalesQL – LinkedIn
• RocketReach – various
• SocialList.io – various (“Contact Finder”)
• Skype_to_email, Email_to_skype
• Skypli
• Google Account Finder
• scylla.sh – leaked accounts

Contact Verification

• Spydialer – verify phone numbers
• carrierlookup.com (one free search per day)
• freecarrierlookup.com 
• Caller ID database: https://www.opencnam.com (worldwide)
• Caller ID database: https://www.phonevalidator.com (US)

• verify-email.org
• verifyemailaddress.org
• hunter.io/email-verifier
• a mass email verification from gmass
• email usage finder Holehe

• Yesware
• Sidekick by Hubspot

Social Media Monitoring

• Google Alerts
• Talkwalker
• Owler – tTrack your competition
• Job alerts – Indeed, SimplyHired, Google Jobs

URL analysis

• godaddy.com/whois provides data for non-European sites
• whoisology.com maintains an archive of all whois records
• Reverse Whois Lookup
• urlscan.io

People Finders

People search that combines data from searching the open web, social sites, and public data. These sites make money by referring visitors to paid sites.

• Zabasearch – one of the older People Finders; seems to show more US phone numbers than some others
• Pipl (paid) – works internationally; checks usernames, phone numbers, and email addresses
• xlek.com – public records search
• Zoominfo – aggregates professional information, including job titles, employers, and contact info, from the web (subscription)

LinkedIn-friendly Boolean Builder by Sourcing Certifications

Company Research and Datasets

• Hoovers (paid)
• PeopleDataLabs Companies
• PeopleDataLabs Job Titles
• Corporationwiki – a crowd-sourced directory
• Crunchbase – crowd-sourced, technology & start-up companies
• Chartloop – builds company orgcharts based on LinkedIn profiles

International Social Networks

• XING
• VKontakte

Custom Search Engines

CSE’s Home on Google

I have created a set of advanced custom search engines for Sourcing – feel free to include them in your practice. See more CSEs on our company page.

My most popular CSE has been “Hidden Profiles” – bit.ly/hiddenprofiles

Global Search Engines

• Google – complete list of operators
• Bing
• Duckduckgo
• Yandex (while being a Russian search engine, it is also a reliable global English-language search engine supporting proximity search)
• StartPage – anonymized Google results

Search “from elsewhere”

• I Search From (based on Google) – searching as if from a different location (based on Google Ads)
• SurfShark – VPN
• TunnelBear – VPN
• SEO Search Simulator by NightWatch

• Events
• Jobs
• Dataset Search
• Hotels
• Podcasts
• medical information
• Find fitness activities you can do at home

Topical Searches

• Amazon advanced book search
• programmableweb.com – API search
• Namechk – username search across networks
• whatsmyname – username search across networks

General Tools

URL Shortening

• Bitly

File Storage and Sharing

• Dropbox
• Google Drive

Record yourself

• Loom

Translate

• Deepl

OCR

• Google Drive
• Google Cloud OCR recognizes formatting
• Yandex Image automatically OCRs when you search by image

Image Editing

• PicPick (has a “blur” function)

Second Chrome to run

• Canary

Formats

• URL Decoder/Encoder
• JSON to CSV Converter

Social Tools

Facebook

• Facebook old UI
• Base64 Encode and Decode (for search URL manipulation)

Social Media Automation

• HootSuite – manage social channels; limited free use
• Buffer – manage content sharing; limited free use
• If This Then That (IFTTT)
• Zapier
• People.camp
• TweetDeck (part of Twitter) – manage and monitor Twitter channels
• followerwonk (Twitter-based)

Other lists of tools

• Martin Freeman’s List
• Awesome Recruitment
• Glossarytech List
• WizardSourcer List
• Dean Da Costa’s start.me pages

Recommended content:

• Sourcing Certifications Newsletter
• Hung Lee’s Recruiting Brainfood
• Week in OSINT
• 10-minute tips from OSINTCurious
• Digital Inspiration (his speech recognition)