Deep and Dark Web Recruitment

Every agency or corporate recruiter is using LinkedIn as a primary tool. It’s simple, fast, and you can reach candidates pretty easily. Other recruitment sources are job boards, Google, and so on. But not every great candidate is on LinkedIn, for various reasons, and not everyone can be found by Google X-ray because Google is not able to penetrate the whole internet and all forums. Since technical forums are quite often password-protected and therefore invisible to Google, Bing or Baidu, you can only locate those by using Booleans and advanced operators. But you cannot always access these websites, because they are hidden in the Deep or Dark Web.

Difference between Deep Web, Dark Web and Surface Web

Everything that search engines can’t access, but is still accessible by a normal browser if you have a URL, is part of the Deep Web.

Everything that is hidden for a purpose, and inaccessible through standard web browsers, is part of the Dark Web. That is a small portion of the Deep Web.

You are visiting numerous websites every day. This part of the Internet is called the Surface Web, which you can visit through search engines. But this is only a small part of the Internet, only around 4%. But what about the remaining 96%?

The vast majority of the Internet lies in the Deep Web. Some statistics mention that the Deep Web is estimated to be 500 times the size of the Surface Web, and I believe the size of the web is definitely even bigger than that.

But no one knows how big the Deep Web really is. Some data is hidden for a purpose (password protected websites/forums), and some of these sites cannot be crawled by current search engine technologies. Data that you can find in the Deep Web is hard for search engines to see, but unseen doesn’t equal unimportant. You can find such interesting data in the Deep Web like company databases, address books, etc. The potential for this data is unlimited.

Deep Web pages are operated just like any other site online, but they are invisible to web crawlers. Search engines (Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex etc.) rely on programs known as crawlers or spiders that gather information by following the trails of hyperlinks that tie the Web together.

Every day, the Deep Web is getting deeper and bigger. Google, Baidu, Bing and the other search engines are going to improve theirs algorithms so they can crawl more data. As the internet grows more and more, it will face the big data problem: how to index, search and analyze all this data.

If you want to find this hidden information or access these hidden web sites, you need special software, such as The Onion Router (commonly known as Tor). To access data on the Deep Web, you use special browser software that helps you reach this hidden part of the internet. Tor is able to help you maintain anonymity online and provides access to so-called hidden services with the .onion pseudo-top-level domain host suffix.

Of course there is a darker side of the Deep Web (fake IDs, stolen passwords…), but it’s also full of a surprising amount of knowledge and interesting data that you can use for your candidate search.

The purpose of this article is not give you a manual on how to source candidates on the Deep Web, but to introduce this part of the Internet to you. The “How to search for candidates on the Deep Web” manual will be a little bit longer than this article.

Deep Web and Dark Web

Deep Web

The Deep Web is sometimes called the Hidden Web or Invisible Web. It is full of pages that cannot be found by crawling. The Deep Web is a part of the internet that is not accessible by these crawlers and search spiders, so you cannot find it over Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. Forums where you can find and contact interesting candidates are quite often password-protected and therefore invisible to Google, Bing or Baidu, but you can locate these forums using Booleans and advanced operators.

One of the Deep Web search engines is Clusty — a meta search engine that combines the results of several top search engines.

Dark Web

This area of the Deep Web is a portion of this part of internet inaccessible through standard web browsers. You will need to use Tor to access the Dark Web.

What is TOR?

TOR (The Onion Router) is a program that makes you anonymous on the Internet. This means that you will be invisible for your internet provider, hackers, ad agencies, and spies, and nobody can tell what you are doing on the Internet without going through a lot of effort.

Note: Accessing the Tor network is legal, although this may not apply to the activities you participate in there or things you can find there.

On Tor you can find password-protected forums, and some of these forums also have a section called “Looking for a job” or “Hire me.”

One of the Dark Web search engines is Ahmia , a search engine for hidden onion sites running inside the Tor network.

Have you ever thought about sourcing candidates on the “Deep/Dark Web”?

Using Tor could unlock the door to a whole “Dark Web World,” and you will see things that you did not think existed online. Reaching candidates in this part of the internet could be your successful sourcing strategy.

Cicada 3301

Cicada 3301 is a name given to an anonymous organization that posted the probably hardest puzzle on the internet. It is basically a recruitment tool and one of the most interesting recruitment campaigns, which consists of a set of complex puzzles with the goal to recruit capable cryptanalysts from the public.

The stated intent was to recruit intelligent individuals by presenting a series of puzzles which were to be solved, each in order to find the next, and taking them into the Deep Web. The Cicada 3301 clues included different communication mediums like the Internet, telephone, music, digital images, pages of books, etc.

No one knows who sets the puzzles, or what the prize is at the end, but some believe it is a recruitment process for the NSA, CIA, MI6, FSB, some mercenary group, or a group of hackers like Anonymous.

The campaign starts with one picture after a designated number of solvers visited particular websites on Tor, and the end of the campaign is when they shut down the website and left only the message that they found the person for them. But the outcome of Cicada 3301 recruiting (and who is behind this) is still a conundrum.

This recruitment campaign from Cicada 3301 was a good inspiration for other cryptographic challenges like Project Architeuthis, developed by The United States Navy. This is based on the Cicada challenge and it’s also used as a recruitment tool for finding the right people with the right skills.

Other agencies like GCHQ also released their ‘Can You Find It?’ competition. This quest is designed to test both experienced and self-taught geeks to crack a series of cryptic codes and the person who can solve this cryptic challenge could be on their way to getting a job as a spy.

The Deep Web and the Dark Web is a great source to find great talents, and it’s a place that only few recruiters operate in. You can search for people in the same space (Surface Web — 4% of the internet) as everybody else, or try to dig deep and use the other 96% of the Internet which only a few others recruiters are using, because the Deep Web is offering a great opportunity.

In this Information Age, the most coveted commodity is information, so the value of the Deep Web is immeasurable, and recruiters and information seekers can no longer avoid its importance.

Have you ever tried to search for candidates there?

Originally published at LinkedIn

Best Tools to Find Email Address

Here Are Some Tools To Find Any Email Address

Clearbit

 Free

 Chrome extension

Miss Rapportive? Here is something better.

Clearbit is an immensely popular lead enrichment tool that not only finds email addresses for you but also other company and personal data from its database.

Using their Gmail integration plugin - Clearbit Connect, you can find employee email addresses for any company using only their domain name.

After installing the plugin and connecting your Gmail account, to find any email address, you can click the Clearbit option in the top right corner of your Gmail Inbox and go about typing in the domain name.

This plugin is completely free.

FindThatLead

 Paid

 Chrome extension

With only the company’s URL, you can find your prospect’s email address using FindThatLead. Enter the domain and click Find Leads to get a list of emails with that domain name. You can then scroll down and pick out your prospect’s email.

FindThatLead also has a chrome extension where you’ll get your prospect’s email address pulled from their LinkedIn profile. Another nifty feature they have is that the plugin will display a certain percentage beside each email address indicating how accurate it is.

VoilaNorbert

Norbert claims that he can find anyone’s corporate email. That’s a bold claim, but he mostly comes through with it.

VoilaNorbert is one the best email-finding tools to come out in recent times. With only a name and company domain name, it can find anyone’s email address and verify it.

VoilaNorbert has a free trial plan that gives you 50 free lead searches. If you want more, there have paid plans.

Adapt.io

 Freemium

 Chrome extension

Adapt.io has a chrome extension, LinkedIn Email Finder that can help you get email addresses from your prospect’s LinkedIn page and export them to your CRM.

Once you install the extension, go to your prospect’s LinkedIn profile and you’ll see a new option called, Get Email.

You can then export that lead from your Adapt.io dashboard to CRMs such as Salesforce, Zoho, and Pipedrive or as a CSV file.

Saleslift follows a freemium model with their basic free plan giving you 100 email lookups/per month

RocketReach

 Freemium

 Chrome extension

Using RocketReach you can find anyone’s email address, phone number and more from 50+ sites in a single search. They have a chrome extension that can extract email addresses from sites such as LinkedIn, Crunchbase, AngelList, Google etc.

Once you’re on your prospect’s site, click on the RocketReach plugin and you’ll get a drop-down of the company’s employees,

From here you can add the email addresses you need to your RocketReach list for further prospecting.

RocketReach follows a freemium model where the basic free plan offers 3 lookups per month and export to CSV feature. With the paid plans, features such as API access, Salesforce integration, bulk lookups and more are available

Hunter.io

 Paid

 Chrome extension

Formerly known as EmailHunter, Hunter.io lets you find email addresses in bulk by company domain.

Pretty simple. If you know the company name, you can just enter it in the provided field and it will show you all the email addresses with that domain name.

Apart from the web version, they have a chrome extension that pulls email addresses from the webpage you are currently sitting on.

You can search up to 100 domains for free each month, and they have paid plans if you want more.

FindThat.Email

 Paid

 Chrome extension

FindThat.Email is a simple email finding tool that promises a high accuracy rate. It uses data analytics and cross-checks to give you the best possible results.

All you need is the First Name, Last Name, and Domain Name to get your email address.

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They also have a chrome extension that works similar to other email finding tools. The plugin automatically pulls the email address when you visit the prospect’s LinkedIn page.

You can create custom and upload email lists for verification. They integrate with MailChimp, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Zoho CRM.

They have plans starting from $29/month for 500 leads.

LeadGibbon

 Paid

 Chrome extension

LeadGibbon is a chrome extension tool that automatically extracts the email addresses of your LinkedIn prospects.

Once the plugin is installed, you can search for your prospect on LinkedIn. Below their profile, you’ll see a LeadGibbon button. Click on that, and you can prospect the email.

They offer a 7-day trial period. And have plans starting from $99/per month.

SellHack

 Paid

 Chrome extension

SellHack is a easy-to-use sales prospecting tool that searches available public sources to find someone’s email address. With only the prospect's name and company domain, SellHack delivers verified email addresses with high accuracy.

They also have a chrome extension that does the same thing.

SellHack has a free trial offering 10 email credits and if you want more, they have paid plans starting from $19/per month.

HeadReach

 Paid

HeadReach is a tool that allows you to search for prospect’s email using their name, company name, website. Apart from these, HeadReach has advanced search options that allows you to search for email addresses by job positions, industry, keywords, country, university name, and so on.

They have paid plans starting from 29$/per month.

Toofr

 Paid

 Chrome extension

Using first and last names, company name and website, you can find email addresses of anyone from countless email address patterns and mail servers, through Toofr’s email finder. They have a Confidence Meter which tells you how accurate the email address is.

Toofr has a chrome extension that lets you find email addresses from the comfort of your current browser window.

Toofr has paid plans starting from $19/month.

Vocus.io

 Paid

 Chrome extension

A Gmail extension that can find anyone’s email address using their name and domain name. Vocus.io’s targeted search is highly efficient; it creates a combination of possible emails using the name and domain name provided and runs each combination through their email verification to give you the email address you’re looking for.

Their extension not only helps you find email addresses, they also let schedule emails to be sent later, track emails, mail merge, and set reminders.

Vocus.io offers a 30-day trial period after which you can opt for their paid plans which start from $5/per month.

Datanyze

 Paid

 Chrome extension

Apart from being a technographic tool for sales and marketing reps, Datanyze has a free chrome extension that extracts email address from the current web window for prospecting purposes. You can also export these new contacts to your CRM, Sheets, or other sales email tools with a single click.

Like mentioned before, the chrome extension is completely free.

SignalHire

 Paid

 Chrome extension

SignalHire is a talent sourcing platform that has a Chrome plugin that extracts your prospect's email address from social media profiles like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, and so on. You can also scour for brand new prospects based in their location.

They claim to have a hit rate of 100% when it comes to verified emails in real time. It’s not only email addresses that SignalHire pulls out, you get their other social media links, phone numbers, Skype ID and other popular messengers.

You can instantly send emails from the search stage, export contacts to CSV, and export candidates to your ATS.

They have paid plans starting from 39$/per month if billed monthly and 29$/per month if billed annually.

skrapp

 Paid

 Chrome extension

Used by major companies like Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, Siemens and so; skrapp is one of the best easy-to-use email finding tools in the market. Their handy Chrome extension adds a nifty Find Email button on your prospects LinkedIn profile page.

skrapp allows you to import your existing CSV leads databases and search for emails. Their cloud servers lets you access your data anytime, from anywhere. You can sync your lead directory with your CRM or Email Service Provider, allowing faster workflow and more flexibility for prospecting.

They have a solid free plan which allows you to search for 150 emails/ per month. Their paid plans start from $39/per month.

FOUND

 Paid

 Chrome extension

Using FOUND you can pull your prospect’s email address, names, job titles, and company from their website or social media profiles like LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, Quora, and so on. Apart from this, FOUND also allows you to add these prospects to various lists and perform email outreach all straight from the plugin.

They follow a quote-priced system - each client receives a specific pricing package tailored to meet their needs.

Snovio

 Freemium

 Chrome extension

Snovio’s chrome extension makes your outbound research easier by helping you find your prospect’s email addresses faster. Get their email addresses along with names and job positions from various domains, and save emails from LinkedIn profiles. You can also send emails to your list of prospects.

Using Snovio you can also check what tech other businesses use, and their Marketplace helps connect freelancers, marketing experts and employers.

They have a basic free plan which offers you 100 credits per month. It’s completely free. However, if you want more they have paid plans started from $19 per month.

LeadMine

 Freemium

 Chrome extension

LeadMine is a powerful lead generation tool that helps you find not only your prospect’s email addresses, but also their titles, industry, location, company, and more. Save all qualified leads with their information into your list with a single click.

You can export you prospect list into a CSV file for sending emails.

A free plan is available where they offer you 10 credits per month. Their paid plans start from $29 per month.

Interseller

 Paid

 Chrome extension

Using Interseller you can find new prospects and add their contact information directly into email campaigns. Their chrome extension adds a Interseller button to LinkedIn, AngelList, Crunchbase, and Github profile pages which lets you get that respective profile’s email address.

Add prospects into an email campaign to automate a series of personalized emails for outreach. Interseller integrates with many tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Bullhorn, Greenhouse, and also has Zapier to keep tabs on all your prospects and communication in one place.

A standard plan of $100 per user per month is available. If you want more features, you can contact them.

emailmatcher

 Free

 Chrome extension

emailmatcher is a simple tool, if you have your prospect’s name and domain name emailmatcher will search it’s databases for a valid email address. They also have a chrome extension which pretty much does the same thing.

It’s completely free!

maildb

 Freemium

A web-based email finding tool, maildb helps you find your email addresses by domain name or by prospect’s name. You can also verify the email ids you find using maildb.

maildb offers 10 requests per month for free. Their paid plans start from $9 for 1000 requests per month.

Lusha

 Freemium

 Chrome extension

Lusha is a chrome plugin that allows you to extract your prospect’s contact information like email address and phone number from their profile page. An easy and very nifty tool, Lusha brings you the information you need in a matter of seconds.

Lusha offers a free plan for one user and 5 credits. For more, you’ll have paid plans starting from $99 per month.

AeroLeads

 Paid

 Chrome extension

AeroLeads is a popular tool for email prospecting and works with multiple websites like LinkedIn, CrunchBase, AngelList, etc. to find business emails as well as phone numbers.

When you add a prospect name or domain to AeroLeads, the service automatically checks for verified email addresses and phone numbers.

It is a user-friendly software that works in real-time and claims a 95% accuracy for the email lists thanks to the four levels of email verification.

Their basic plan starts from $49/month for 500 records.

Anymail Finder

 Paid

 Chrome extension

Anymail finder is an email finder tools which helps you find individual emails as well as build email lists.

When using the tool, enter the prospect’s name and their company website and the tool will guess their email address.

Anymail finder searches billions of web pages and performs direct server validation and charges only for emails that are successfully verified.

They give 20 free credits after which the paid plans start from $18/month.

Discoverly

 Free

 Chrome extension

A tool specifically designed for recruiters, it is one of the best tools out there in that segment.

Discoverly accumulates a candidate’s social information from platforms like Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and pops out as a sidebar, giving you relevant information.

When using the tool, you to enter a few possible email permutations and Discoverly pinpoints the most likely.

Hiretual

 Paid

 Chrome extension

Hiretual is an email prospecting tool that allows you to pull up prospect information from across social media channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Another tool that is specially designed for recruiters, the tool finds email addresses as well as other useful information like the their title within the company.

Hiretual uses artificial intelligence and collects information from around the web to build a full profile on the person you’re looking for.

Their free trial offers 10 credits after which the premium plan costs $89/month for 200 searches.

LeadGrabber

 Paid

 Chrome extension

LeadGrabber is one of the most popular email finding tools.

When using the tool, all you have to do is, enter the list of companies and it researches LinkedIn, company websites and Google for the names of CEOs, VPs and other decision makers, returning with a list of email addresses, LinkedIn ids and phone numbers.

The tool also integrates with Salesforce.

The tool gives 50 free records after which it costs $0.10 for additional records(emails).

Free: 100 credits. Paid plans available on enquiry.

Nymeria

 Paid

 Chrome extension

Nymeria is a great email finder tool if you want to find emails from Linkedin.

The extension allows you to scan through LinkedIn profiles to find verified email addresses, which you can then export to a spreadsheet.

Their basic plan starts from $9/month, which enables you to search for up to 1,000 emails.

Name2Email

 Free

 Chrome extension

Name2Email is an extension for Gmail.

Using the tool, you need to compose an email and add a full name and domain to the address bar - the tool automatically generates a list of common corporate email addresses for the person you want to reach.

To improve your chances of finding a valid email, you can hover your cursor over the generated addresses. If a popup shows the person’s name; then you’ve chosen the right address.

LeadBoxer

 Paid

 Chrome extension

LeadBoxer is a great tool for finding as well as qualifying the email contacts.

It is a single tool with many functionalities, like identify potential customers, filtering your email lists, and qualifying your leads through dynamic lead scoring.

With the tool, you can also receive notifications and updates when specific customers engage in conversion activities on your site or read your emails.

Additionally, you can identify the contact information of your website’s visitors.

Their pricing plan starts from $99/month.

Orbitly

 Freemium

Orbitly is an easy-to-use lead enrichment tool that lets you upload a list of names, emails, LinkedIn profile urls, Twitter handles, and other social media profiles to fill in any missing lead data, so you can get in touch with the people that matter most for your business.

You can turn any lead record into full contact profiles instantly by uncovering data on over 20 unique fields — like company, employee count, job title, role, and more.

The tool can find emails from just Facebook profiles, Twitter handles, LinkedIn profile urls, phone numbers, or name and company.

Orbitly is a pay as you grow platform and lets you buy as many credits as you need. No monthly subscriptions. Plans start at $9 for 100 lead enrichment credits.

Slik Prospector

 Paid

Slik Prospector is a popular email prospecting tool to generate highly-targeted lead lists, thanks to their database of 70 million addresses, with an accuracy claim of 95%.

With the tool, you can filter emails by job title, industry, company size, or location.

Their pricing starts at $70/month for 500 searches.