We explored in the last posting how to use Google to find your candidate’s contact information. If you are trying to track down a company email for a candidate, the best way is to enter @companydomain.com in a search engine like Google. You should see other emails that exist on the internet for this company and more importantly, you should see the email format that this particular company uses. More than likely, it will be either firstname.lastname or first initial+lastname or firstname+last initial.
Be warned though, sometimes employees of a company get to choose the username they want. This could be a set of initials, a first name, or a nickname. If you feel that you are sure about the address, you can always send your email and see if you get a response. If you don’t, then another email to the next one. If the email doesn’t exist, then you will get a bounce back from their server. If their mail server accepts SMTP authorization, then you can use one of the email verification tools we talked about in the previous article.
Some potential candidates can’t be found anywhere on the web except postings in technical newsgroups. The newsgroups or Usenet is what the internet used to be before we entered the wonderful world of hypertext documents back in 1991. Engineers and research scientists still use newsgroups to post a topic and start a discussion. Everyone who belongs to these groups has to sign to use & respond to them. Google now owns the web-based version of these newsgroups. Luckily for us, they can be easily searched. The trick is to search either the name of the individual you are looking for, or use the author: command.
Click on the first image for the slideshow:
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- Mark