Finding talent is hard work and sourcing passive candidates is even harder. The good news is that there are some pretty good (and free) Chrome extensions for recruiters who source to make our lives easier… at least from a candidate sourcing perspective.
I’ve written quite a bit here and here about how we can elevate talent acquisition. Sometimes I get a little… umm… shall we say “passionate” like I did here and then again here, but my heart is always in the right place.
Sourcing passive candidates should be part of every recruitment process
If a sourcing strategy is not part of your recruitment process, please, please, please change this. It will make everyone’s lives (recruiters and hiring managers) so much easier.
Your time-to-fill rates will significantly decrease if you’re taking the time to source.
With unbelievably high req loads, I know finding time to source candidates seems impossible, but if you can squeeze in just a few hours a week, it will be worth it.
Of course you can identify potential talent through tools like LinkedIn, but who knows who’s really active on LinkedIn and who’s not. For recruiters who prefer to send emails directly (rather than InMails), finding accurate email addresses, or *gasp* phone numbers, takes a bit more searching.
Enter awesome Chrome extensions…
Chrome extensions every recruiter who sources should use
If you had to pick just a few Chrome extensions, here are some awesome ones that every recruiter should have.
1. Improver
Improver is a great chrome extension to help recruiters find personal email addresses and phone numbers for passive candidates. It’s impressively accurate with a personal email address. Sometimes, it will also give you a work email address as well, which is helpful for business development email.
With a free subscription, you get 10 free credits a month. If you source candidates more often, you may prefer the next level up, which is a paid feature. For $15/month, you have access to 50 credits.
2. Lusha
The downside is that the free plan only gives you 3 free credits a month, which really isn’t much if you source often.
Lusha is one of the best chrome extensions for recruiters who source on Twitter (as well as LinkedIn of course). It helps you find both emails and phone numbers for candidates.
The Chrome extension appears whenever you’re on Twitter or LinkedIn and lets you know if someone has their contact info in Lusha’s database. If a potential candidate does, then you just click on the icon.
Lusha tends to lean more on giving you work email addresses rather than personal ones (Improver is far better for personal email addresses).
There’s a free and paid plan, but the beauty of Lusha is that you don’t have to waste-free credits unless you see that someone has contact info in their database.
3. ContactOut
If you’ve anything the best Chrome extensions for recruiters, ContactOut will always be on the list. It’s remarkably reliable for personal email addresses and will often give you multiple email address results.
When you first sign up, you get a ton of free credits, so you may not even have to purchase a paid subscription.
A word of caution — it works best in the US and EU. Although ContactOut says it provides a large number of phone numbers as well, it tends to do better with email addresses rather than phone numbers.
4. Hunter
Hunter a great Chrome extension to find someone’s work email address by domain, which is awesome for agency recruiters who are in business development mode.
The extension helps you find an email address when you’re on a company’s website. It will also show you which email address is actually confirmed and which ones are guesses. The guesses have been pretty good. It will also confirm the company’s email pattern like firstname.lastname@gmail.com or firstname@domain.com.
5. Rocket Reach
Rocket Reach lets you search by name or LinkedIn profile to find email addresses. It gives you multiple email addresses and even links to social media profiles.
6. Hiretual
Hiretual has quite a few functions, but one of the main ones is its ability to extract passive candidate contact information across several different platforms and 700 million professional profiles.
Their AI search engine helps recruiters find the right candidates and it has a function that also creates boolean strings for you.
The AI search engine is similar to LinkedIn’s, but the beauty of Hiretual is that rather than sending candidates InMails, you can send them direct communication via email or even a phone call since the platform gives you contact information.
Sourcers and Recruiters with too many Chrome extensions…
There’s a Chrome extension for that 😉
If you’re the type of recruiter with so many Chrome extensions that your browser crashes all the time (welcome to the club!), there is actually yet another extension for that.
Extensity houses all of your Chrome extensions and sits conveniently next to your address bar. When you click on it, it shows you a dropdown list of all your extensions.
Some Chrome extensions don’t play nice in the sandbox with each other, so Extensity allows you to disable and enable them directly from the dropdown list.
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