I had been out of work for five months. I noticed that, while on phone interviews, I would repeat something on almost every call. While walking the interviewer through my experience, I would make the point that, while working in the veterinary industry, I became a people search engine expert. If you don’t know what a people search engine is, it is a website, Chrome extension, any type of tool that helps you find contact information.
I worked in the veterinary industry for a year-and-a-half, and my main task was to find veterinarians and their personal contact information. I built up big pipelines for the recruiters to reach out to these doctors, trying to get them to join our company. It’s not hard to find veterinarians, but what is hard is finding their personal email and phone number. I tried and tried, but I thought it was impossible. No matter what I did, I kept winding up with the hospital’s phone number and the doctor’s work email.
Sourcing for Doctors, you not only get good with people search engines, but you gain the skills of using open web and Boolean. Doctors don’t really exist on Indeed or LinkedIn. They do, but chances are they are on there to network with old friends from medical school, or they are looking to hire for their own company, and they don’t often respond to recruiters.*
When you find a veterinarian’s name, the next thing you do is look for their email address and phone number. It’s not a bad thing to find the number to the hospital or the format for their work email address. In fact, you want to find these things so you can then take them out of your search string.
If you find a veterinarian named Jack Russell and the number to the hospital he works at is 857-5309, your next search should look like this: “Jack Russell” -5309. Take out the last four digits of the hospital number. Let Google, or whichever engine you are using, know that you don’t want ANY results associated with the hospital number.
If you find out that the email format for the hospital is firstname.lastname@dogdocs.com, add -dogdocs or -@dogdocs to your search. You will see your search results narrow. To be even more specific, you can start adding other things to the search and make it look something like: “jack russell” AND (cell OR mobile OR phone) AND (email OR @gmail.com OR @hotmail.com or @live.com OR @aol.com OR @yahoo.com) -5309 -dogdocs -veterinary -hospital.
A list of good People Search Engines
• Radaris
• Hiretual
• SeekOut
• Spokeo
That’s just a taste, as this article isn’t about the best people search engines. You can find more in other SourceCon articles and just by searching for yourself!
Want to know a great way to test a people search engine? Look yourself up! Or look up the contact information of someone you know who is super private and doesn’t have their information listed. When you do find their correct information somewhere, let this friend know about the site and have them reach out to them to remove their information.
Note: If the people search engine you are using seems to be loading for longer than you think it should, just exit the window. By the time the search is done, they will ask you for money to get the information. Also, if your search launches another website with a totally different name, don’t bother.
When it comes to hiring tech people – a lot of them have their own website. Because of this, you can find their contact information easily. When it comes to things like hiring mechanics, salesmen, doctors – you can pretty much always find websites that display each member on their team. I remember when I was hiring tractor salespeople, I would look at competitors in the area and look up the page that displayed their salespeople. And most of them listed their cell phone, as they were on the road a lot. When you are sourcing for veterinarians in Boston, you can search for: (veterinary OR veterinarian OR “animal hospital”) AND Boston AND (staff OR “meet our” OR “who we are”). This is a really simple way to build a big pipeline. You won’t often see contact information here, but you will get many names.
Another Great Way to Find Contact Information for a Doctor
LinkedIn! Request to connect with doctors on LinkedIn. When they accept your request, you automatically get access to their email and sometimes their phone number. I can’t promise you it will always be their personal information, though.
I do want to point out, however, if you are hiring for doctors, you should still have an Indeed Resume and LinkedIn Recruiter seat. If you can get one hire from each of them a year, and that would be a low number, you would more than break even.
Not all of these are solely people search engines. Some are different platforms that happen to also help you find email and phone numbers.
