By Mike Chuidian
The World Wide Web is a beautiful thing. We as sourcers and recruiters don’t even begin to scratch the surface when it comes to mining data/information on the great WWW. But we have some hope for getting a lot of that data, right? You know the saying….The one with the most information wins. If you source on LinkedIn or any of the many social media platforms (i.e. Github, StackOverflow, FB, Twitter, Behance, etc.) we utilize, often times it’s hard to come by good contact information.
I particularly love IT dudes/dudettes that have their own websites. Why? Because it can be a wealth of information. Whether that be their interests, the kind of work they do, or maybe if you’re lucky, some contact info….Not. So. Much. In this post, I’ll show you how to glean those 2 ever so important pieces of information….the phone number and email. Heck sometimes we can get the home address!
Usually, personal websites are either stumbled upon or on people’s Social Media bios. There are tons of personal websites out there, but very few reveal their contact info. So how do we glean that information? Let’s get started….
Step1. First we check out a personal website….Looks pretty good to me!
Step 2. I then click on “Contact”. But……..it’s the dreaded “Fill out the form”. Boooo!! What a buzz kill for such an assumed highly qualified candidate! 
Step 3. OK…..Challenge accepted! I like to use Whois.com. This site basically allows you to enter in the websites’ URL to gain information on the owner of the website.
Step 4. Hit “Search”…….and VOILA!! You get this information…..
Now as you can see, there’s all kinds of goodies on this page…..Phone#, email address, and even the home address! Exactly what I need to engage with this individual. But how do I know it’s the contact info of the person I intend to contact? Call them!!! DUH!! This one happened to check out.
There is a caveat to this obviously….Not all website owners will leave their website registrar public and will put privacy filters up. You can usually tell which registrars have been made private. But for the most part, a lot of these personal websites have public registrars.
So have fun with it! It’s another trick up your sourcing sleeve that is sure to be very helpful. I want to give a big shout out to Steve Levy for putting me on to this a while back. Dude is a sourcing genius!
Mike Chuidian is a Sr. IT Recruiting Consultant with Deloitte, and has worked with growing companies such as SAI and Comcast. He’s also an epic connoisseur of sneakers. Keep in touch with Mike on LinkedIn or Twitter
Ed Note: This post was originally posted on Rad Recruiter, and republished with the Author’s consent.
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