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
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
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
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
Custom Search Engines
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
File Storage and Sharing
Record yourself
Translate
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
Formats
Social Tools
- 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
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