Business networking is key to success in today’s competitive environment, allowing companies and individuals to connect with other businesses, find employees, or build relationships with potential partners. And even though social networking sites can help you reach out to practically anyone today, email remains the primary form of written business communication. So, no matter if you wish to contact a certain company’s employees for business development, marketing, networking, or recruiting, you need their valid email address first.
There are several ways to get that information — even if you’ve never met the recipient in person. Below, we will start with the obvious tips and move on to a few more challenging cases when the information you need is not publicly available online.
Table of Contents:
Using Professional Networking Sites
When you want to find company staff, the first obvious step is going to social media, starting with the ultimate favorite – LinkedIn. A lot of users include their contact details and email addresses in their profile’s info section or summary. If the person you’re looking for is already in your connections list, navigate to the LinkedIn profile you need to find their publicly listed contact information.
For example, you can see a quick preview of the most active LinkedIn members associated with the company even before you navigate to the official company page. Here’s what a quick LinkedIn search for Apple looks like:
But since those are only the most active accounts, you will have better odds at finding more employees if you navigate to the company’s official page to check out its available employee directory. To do this, you need to:
- Type in the company name in the LinkedIn search tab;
- Choose the company you need from available search results;
- Navigate to the People section.
Note that the larger the company, the more members will be associated with it. Here’s what an Apple LinkedIn profile looks like after you’ve completed the above steps.
In that case, you could use the search tab again to find relevant contacts by job title, keyword, or school. Other search presets are usually defined by the company, but you will have a chance to browse all available employees by location, skillsets, and connection degree (first, second, etc.). After that, you can once again navigate to the shortlisted profiles to see which information users have made public. But in most cases, you will only be able to find profiles of people when you know their full names – the preset search filters only help narrow down the results.
In any case, the LinkedIn browsing approach is only fruitful with smaller businesses, or when you’re looking for a specific person – after all, it’s mostly a business networking site. But for large-scale recruiting, marketing, or business development, official channels can usually help you find emails of CEOs or other C-Level execs. With ‘smaller fish,’ the game is usually not worth the candle. So, it makes sense to try a few other methods instead.
Doing Google Searches
When performing Google searches strategically, you can also easily find employee email addresses. “Google Dorking” or using Google’s advanced search operators helps you locate the information you need in no time. But there are a few things you will need to understand first if you really want to find employees in a specific company.
How Google Search Operators Work
Google advanced search operators are a series of special characters and commands that extend the search engine’s capabilities. The most useful operators for finding email addresses are:
- site: (restricts search results to a specific domain)
- intitle: (searches for pages that have specific words in tiles)
- inurl: (searches for pages that have specific words in the URL)
- “” (searches for exact phrases)
While searching for an email address of a specific person, the ‘site:’ operator is the surest way because it can pull contact data of an employee directly from the official company website – but only if it’s made public there. If not, it will browse other websites – with reference to the company name, of course.
Here’s how this command looks in theory:
site:companywebsite.com + [Full Name] + Email
or:
site:companywebsite.com + [Full Name] + Contact
In practice, however, it’s not always that easy. We decided to look up Olivia Lee, communications manager at Apple Singapore division LinkedIn suggested in its quick search. And here is what we get after entering ‘Site:apple.com + Olivia Lee + Contact’ in Google search:
So, we’re back to square one. You can try to combine the operators to create other queries to find company staff, of course. These queries can be based on:
- employee name and company domain (“John Doe” email site:company.com);
- title keywords (“John Doe” “contact” site:company.com);
- title and domain (“Marketing Manager” email site:company.com);
- or role (“HR Director” contact email site:company.com).
Still, the search results will usually be no more useful than the screen above.
Try guessing common email formats
You can also create search queries using common email patterns, i.e., “firstname.lastname@company.com” site:company.com. Here is what we get after searching for Olivia Lee:
More common search operators may be based on:
- email formats (“email” @company.com),
- company contact pages (“contact us” site:company.com),
- Team or About Us page (“team” site”company.com).
Still, as you might have guessed by now, the results are not certain. So, it makes sense to explore even more advanced search options.
Using SignalHire Contact Finding Tool
A professional contact database is the surest solution to finding relevant contact details of all employees within a given company. Here, at SignalHire, you can get access to millions of verified professional contacts across different industries, as well as companies directory, with comprehensive employee lists neatly gathered in one place. But let’s see how it works in more detail.
To start using SignalHire, sign up for the service (using email, LinkedIn, or Facebook) – you will instantly get access to a free account that features five searches a month. The dashboard to welcome you will look like this:
From here, you could use the quick search feature to find employees by name or LinkedIn url. The quick search also works fine with emails and phone numbers (as a reverse lookup tool), but this is not the case today.
If the quick contact database lookup did not help, add more known parameters to the left search tab. Scrolling down this tab will lead you to the advanced search where you can indicate even more parameters, like the actual company, years of experience, industry, etc. And here’s what you get after specifying name, company, job title, and location in the SignalHire search system – the second result is the right hit!
Now, you can click on the ‘REVEAL CONTACTS’ button and get that information you were looking for.
Clearly, this search type will only help if you know some information about the person you’re looking for. If you know very little or want to get access to all employee contacts within a company, you should head straight to the SignalHire companies directory.
You can specify all the details you have in the search tab to the left, and then click on ‘View Employees’ to get access to all the available corporate contacts. Clearly, the larger the company, the more profiles its employee directory will feature (with Apple, we have over 35,000 pages). So, use the search filters wisely to find people you need sooner!
But that’s not all. On top of using SignalHire’s main database, you can install our Chrome/Firefox extension that integrates with LinkedIn and other websites, including Facebook and GitHub. With its help, you can pull contact data on individual profiles as you come across them on social media. Here is how the result looks on LinkedIn – a neat preview that quickly redirects you to necessary contact data.
Asking the Company Directly
Don’t forget that often, the easiest way to find company staff is to ask the company directly. Make sure to explain why you need the email addresses of employees and be respectful when asking for information. HR departments of companies always have general information about employees. HR contact details should usually be available online, but keep in mind that HRs cannot share other people’s contact details for privacy reasons (and because they do not want a competitor company to attract their best talent, of course). However, with a bit of luck, you might find the address of someone you’re looking for via official company channels.
Conclusion
It can be very challenging to find employee email addresses, but with the right tools and strategies, you will surely manage. Leveraging company websites, contact-finding tools, professional networking sites, and strategic Google searches, you can eventually locate the information you need.
When you do, remember to respect privacy and use the information responsibly. Plus, anytime you are pitching a business offer or plan to attract new talent, you need to know more about the recipient to start with the right hook. For that, a quick social media search will be very useful, and we have a separate guide on how social media lookup by email works. After all, you already have the email address you need!
