Most recruiters know how to find good candidates. The slow part comes next. You have a name and a job title, and no way to reach the person. So you go looking. You check the profile. You guess the email format. You try again.
For an agency running several searches at once, this is where days disappear. Here are seven ways to shorten it.
1. Start with the whole company, not one person
Most people search one name at a time. Try the opposite. Pull the full list of people who work at a target company, then narrow it down.
This works best at large employers, where a company's own careers page tells you almost nothing about who actually works there. A live employee list lets you filter by team, seniority or job title and see the real shape of the org. SignalHire's employee list for Amazon shows what that looks like at scale.
If you are working a big account, this beats scrolling profiles one by one.
2. Boolean search on LinkedIn
This is still the basic tool. You combine terms with AND, OR and NOT to cut a huge pool down to a short list. Search for the skill, exclude the job titles you do not want, add the city.
A working example for a backend role:
("backend engineer" OR "software engineer") AND (Python OR Go) AND Bangalore NOT recruiter NOT intern
Two habits make this much better. Put exact job titles in quotes, or you will match every profile that happens to contain both words. And use NOT early to strip out the noise you already know you do not want — recruiters, interns, and anyone selling to the role rather than doing it.
It is good at finding the person. It does not give you their email or phone number. So treat it as step one, not the whole job.
3. Look up contacts without leaving the page
Switching tabs breaks your rhythm. You open a profile, copy the name, move to another tool, wait, come back. Do that thirty times and the day is gone.
A browser extension removes the switch. It runs on the profile you already have open. You click once, get the email and phone number, and move to the next person. On a heavy sourcing day this is the single biggest time saver on this list.
4. Search in plain English
Filters are fiddly. You have to know which box to tick and in what order. Newer tools let you skip that: you describe the person you want in a normal sentence, and the tool works out the filters for you.
SignalHire's Advanced AI Contact Finder demo shows how it works. You type what you are looking for, and you get a list back. When you are juggling five open roles, saving two minutes per search adds up quickly.
5. Go where the engineers are
For technical roles, LinkedIn is often the wrong place to look. Many developers keep a thin LinkedIn profile and do their real work in public somewhere else.
GitHub is the obvious one. People list contact details on their profile, and their commit history tells you what they actually build. Stack Overflow and project mailing lists work the same way. A candidate who never answers a LinkedIn message may well reply to an email about their own project.
It also gives you something a CV cannot. You can see the code, how often they ship, and how they handle review comments from other people. For a senior hire, that is a better signal than a bullet point claiming five years of experience.
6. Read the company website
This one is slow, so save it for when the other methods come up short.
Press pages, investor relations pages and partner directories often list real names and real email addresses. These are rarely the hiring manager. But they tell you how the company builds its email addresses, and that pattern usually holds across the whole business.
That is the real prize. Once you can see that the company uses first.last@ rather than flast@ or first@, you can work out the likely address for anyone there. Verify it before you send — a guess that bounces costs you a little sender reputation every time.
It works best at smaller companies, where one page can cover most of the team.
7. Check before you send
Once you have a shortlist, spend a minute confirming it. If you already know someone at the company, ask them whether the person still works there and still does that job. People move, and contact records go stale.
For high-volume sourcing this is optional. For a senior or executive search, where you may only get one shot at a small number of people, it is worth the minute.
Putting it together
No single method covers everything. The agencies that fill roles fastest tend to combine three: company-level lists for coverage, plain-English search for speed, and a browser extension for accuracy while they work.
One last thing, and it matters more than it sounds. If your sourcing tool finds contacts but you still export them to a spreadsheet and retype them into your ATS, you give back most of the time you just saved. Whatever you use, make sure the contact lands in the system you actually work in.
The goal was never to collect names. It is to reach the right person, with the right details, before another agency gets there first.