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)

Organize Add-ons in Chrome

• Extensity

Image-Related  

• “Image Match” on Bing
• Reverse Image Search on Yandex (better than Google’s)
• Search by Image (three choices – Google, Bing, and Yandex)

Search-Related

• Chrome Manage Search Engines
• Selection Search (Chrome)
• SearchPreview
• Autopagerize

Capturing Web Content

• Evernote – a powerful app – capture and organize content from the web
• CometDocs – convert PDF to Excel

Writing

• Grammarly

Checking job posts:

• Textio  (subscription)
• Jobint
• Gender Decoder

Scraping, Parsing, Filtering, and Sorting

• Outwit Docs – “download manager”
• Outwit Hub – advanced web scraping tool. It parses and collects data on web pages, in cases where there are lists of similar entries
• Email Extractor – paste text in the box, and it will 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 – has scrapers for LinkedIn and Facebook and various automation scripts
• 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 free trial  

Social Lookup

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator – finds the LinkedIn profile based on an email address (former Rapportive)
• Discover.ly – see social profiles in Gmail
• Hunter – has a database of email addresses found on the web (and it tells us where!), predicts email addresses based on the database
• Contact+ (formerly FullContact) – 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 FullContact
• Connectifier Social Links – conveniently points to a person’s social profiles elsewhere
• GlossaryTech – highlights and explains technical terms on a profile
• OctoHR – shows the programming languages for a user on Github

Lookup & Contact Info

• ContactOut – look up contact info on LinkedIn
• Lusha – look up contact info on LinkedIn
• Nymeria – find contact info on LinkedIn
• Find That Lead – lead generation tool for b2b companies
• ZAPinfo (formerly WebClipDrop) – collect profiles; enrich the records with contact and other info

Contact Verification

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

• MailTester

Email Tracking

• Yesware
• Sidekick by Hubspot

Alerts / Real-Time Search / Social Media Monitoring

• Google Alerts
• An alternative – Talkwalker alerts
• SocialSearcher
• Owler – Track your competition
• Job post and resume alerts – Indeed  and SimplyHired

Search in the Past

• WayBack Machine – Internet Archive

People and Company Search

• Zoominfo – aggregates professional information, including job titles, employers, and contact info, from the web (paid subscription)
• LinkedIn Company search tool from Blockspring

WHOIS

Due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) “whois” data is no longer available for European websites.

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

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
• Radaris
• Namechk – checks usernames across networks

Company Research

• Hoovers
• Manta – small business search in the US
• Corporationwiki – a crowd-sourced directory
• Crunchbase – technology companies
• AngelList – start-ups

International Social Networks

• XING
• Viadeo (was bought in 2017)
• 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 in your practice. See more CSEs on our company page.

Global Search Engines

• Google
• Bing
• Duckduckgo
• Yandex (a Russian search engine; it is also a reliable global English-language search engine supporting proximity search)
• The tool I Search From (based on Google) provides searching as if from a different location

General Tools

URL Shortening

• Goo.gl
• Bitly – also has a chrome extension

File Storage and Sharing

• Dropbox
• Google Drive

Social Tools

Automation/Scheduling for Social Media Management

• HootSuite – manage social channels; limited free use
• Buffer – manage content sharing; limited free use
• If This Then That (IFTTT)
• Zapier
• People.camp

Twitter-Based

• TweetDeck (part of Twitter) – manage and monitor Twitter channels
• SocialBro (free trial)
• followerwonk

Other lists of tools:

• Martin Freeman’s List
• Awesome Recruitment
• Glossarytech List
• WizardSourcer List