Job Networking Challenge - How to find Contact Details for a Person

One of the challenges that job networkers come across regularly is how to contact professional people of interest. Actually, of course the first task is to identify people of interest, and then you reach this issue of how to contact them. I found an article on this subject: http://www.thewisejobsearch.com/2010/05/i-got-contact-name-how-do-i-reach-them.html.

I would like to interject a couple of comments to the article, based upon my personal experiences:

• I have found that sending messages via LinkedIn works quite well, and I get a good response. In order to be able to write to someone in LinkedIn, you either need to be directly connected to them or share a group. If you can’t write to someone directly on LinkedIn, search for them on Facebook and write to them there.
• I have not had much success in finding telephone numbers and/or email address from Google searches. At one time this worked for me well, but lately it has produced poor results.

One of the things that I especially liked in this article was the link to a site that details the email format of various corporations: http://sites.google.com/site/emails4corporations/. The website objective is to help people that have a name and company of a person and want to infer their email address. The underlying principle is that companies use some sort of email naming convention. For instance, if the format that a company uses is FirstNameLastInitial@companyname.co.il, and the person you are trying to reach is Sarah Plony at the Sabra company, then you would know to send your message to SarahP@sabra.co.il. This is not an infallible system as companies have more than one convention (or even no convention at all), but it is an excellent starting point. Included on this site is also the switchboard telephone number and city.

I think this is an excellent resource, and I would love to see something similar focused on Israel (the above is targeted mostly at US companies). The question is if others out there also see value in creating such a repository of information, and are ready to help populate it. I certainly don’t want to re-create what already exists, and there are already a variety of Israeli company databases. However, these do not assist job seekers to find employee email addresses, and that is a critical piece of information.

What I am thinking as an initial effort is to create a spreadsheet which I will then make freely available to everyone. The information to be collected for each company would be:

• Company Name
• City
• Telephone
• Internet Site
• E-Mail Format
• Email Example

For instance, I invested a couple of minutes on Internet and created this entry:

• Company Name – Better Place
• City – Tel Aviv
• Telephone - 073-7777222
• Internet Site - http://www.betterplace.com/
• E-Mail Format – FirstName.LastName
• Email Example – Sarah.Plony@betterplace.com

This list will only be as useful as the comprehensiveness of its contents. The only way I can imagine to make it valuable is if this is undertaken as a collaborative effort. I believe that many people already have information saved about their current and past job searches which contain much of this information. Finding the details for companies is usually quite easy. If current, past and future job seekers can add what they know, and enough people participate, I am sure we can quickly get something excellent online quickly.

Please send details to me at ron@israemploy.net. The best format for sending the information would be Excel.