There are 2 sites I use on a regular basis when I need to find a large number of contacts. Usually, I’m looking for a population of people with a specific skill set and I want to be able to reach out to them quickly. The first site I use should be familiar to most sourcers. I turn to zoominfo.com
Zoominfo
Zoominfo does offer a free trial and I recommend it as a starting point. You’re not able to download and export contacts but you will be able to view them individually. This will give you a chance to demo Zoominfo and test the quality of the information for yourself. It is also a great tool to use when you want to figure out the email format of a top competitor that you know you will recruit from frequently.
Personally, I pay for the premium account. It gives me access to unlimited views and I pay for a certain number of contacts every month. The filters are Boolean friendly and allow me to conduct a search against multiple key words, companies and locations simultaneously.
They also have several filters that I have not seen on a traditional job board. You can cross reference your search for other information found on the web. In the demo they use a search to find a CFO from the telecom industry that also has IPO experience as an example. I’m not aware of another search engine that allows you to cross reference so many points of data.
Also, Zoominfo can be x-rayed. I’ve written a sample search string below.
site:zoominfo.com/p “java developer” | “new york city” | *@gmail.com
site:zoominfo.com/p “java developer” | “new york city” | *@gmail.com
If you were at SourceCon in Dallas, you might have seen me demo Mozilla. Mozilla is a scraper that will allow you to pull the information from the search results and drop them into an excel spreadsheet. However, there are many different tools that will allow you to scrape the data from your x-ray.
Overall, I recommend Zoominfo for a team of recruiters that needs to be able to contact a large number of professionals in a specific vertical in a short period of time.
Netprospex
Netrospex is my “ace in the hole.” It’s a site similar to Zoominfo but not quite as well known. I like it because I can find a lot of contacts on Netprospex that I’m not able to find on Zoominfo. It also permits me to trade contacts for credits. A strategy I use is to download contacts from Zoominfo then trade them at Netprospex for free contacts. It is also possible to download contacts from a CRM to use to trade. Contacts may also be purchased at a very reasonable price. I’ve banked enough traded credits that I generally don’t have to pay for contacts.
I come to Netprospex second because the filters just aren’t as good as Zoominfo. The system will often lag or crash if I try to put to many filters into my search. Also, you cannot x-ray Netprospex. That said it is a solid tool that very few people use and it is a great way to get a quick hit on a number of contacts that you might not be able to find using other sources.
Using these two tools I’m almost always able to at least find a corporate email format and a main line for a company so I can call in. Remember that if you have a LinkedIn Recruiter account you can also upload those contacts into your LinkedIn Recruiter seat. It will automatically match the information to their LinkedIn profiles.
That way when you search in the future you don’t need to cross-reference your results between your lists and LinkedIn. There are step-by-step instructions on how to do that in a previous article I wrote for SourceCon. I hope you find these tools useful and I’m looking forward to your comments on other tools you have used to find emails and phone numbers!