Data Mining: How To Acquire Accurate Contact Info for Candidates

Hopefully as a power sourcing recruiter or talent acquisition pro, you have a few tools in your arsenal that allow you to scrape contact data from a candidate‚Äôs LinkedIn or other social profiles. Products such as Hunter, Prophet, ReachOut, ContactOut, and Hiretual have entered the market over the past couple of years and have been billed as a way for recruiters or marketers to gather contact information that‚Äôs not easily found. All function as a Google Chrome extension and live in your browser, making it easy to find a candidate‚Äôs information when sourcing on LinkedIn, Indeed, or other social profiles. At Kinetix, our team has used all of these tools at one time or another, and we‚Äôre ready to run through a quick comparison so you can make an informed decision on which tool is best for you.

To kick it off, let’s take a quick look at Hunter. Hunter was the first contact extension we rolled out to our team and remains in our arsenal today. Both a website and Chrome extension, Hunter allows you to find information based off of a social profile, email domain, or even by scraping a website. Hunter also provides the best experience if you’re looking to use the free version, allowing you to pull up to 150 contacts per month. The only drawback is the free version doesn’t allow for seamless data extraction to a CSV.

Let‚Äôs go ahead and take a quick look at the next three as they all generally share the same functionality. Prophet, ReachOut, and ContactOut are very similar in many ways and should be an essential part of your sourcing toolkit. Prophet was created by the team at HiringSolved and expands their reach into the passive candidate sourcing space by working seamlessly with their existing platform. It‚Äôs also currently in beta testing as a standalone product for your recruiting team to use. ReachOut was created by the team at ZoomInfo and also integrates with their core contact database. If you‚Äôre looking to use ReachOut, you will need a ZoomInfo account. ContactOut is the last of the basic contact extensions and is a standalone product developed specifically for sourcing candidates. They claim to be in use by at least 30% of the recruiting teams at companies on the Fortune 500 list.

Our favorite contact mining extension here at Kinetix is Hiretual. Developed and advised by some of the leading recruiters and HR practitioners in the industry, Hiretual provides the most immersive experience on the market. It not only scraps LinkedIn for contact information. salary data if available, and other factors but it also includes a dashboard that keeps a repository of all the contacts you‚Äôve viewed. Also included in the dashboard is a boolean string builder and an AI enhanced sourcing function that will run targeted searches based on a variety of factors. With all these bells and whistles, it‚Äôs easy to see why Hiretual rises above all the other offerings in the market.

If you’re looking to up your sourcing game, check out some of the platforms we mentioned and let us know how you like them!