Read any post about InMails and LinkedIn, and you’ll hear that engagement rates for InMails are very poor, talent is disengaged from the site, people turn off notifications, they only log in when they’re looking for a job.

So here’s a few ways to skip the pain (and expense) of InMail rejection.

Prophet

An absolutely essential tool for any Recruiter. You need to use Chrome to use it, but then as a Recruiter you should only ever use Chrome anyway (in our opinion).

It’s a plug in that you install by going here and click the big red button to download it.

It then sits in the top right of your page when browsing. When you’re on a social profile, LinkedIn, Facebook or wherever else, just click the arrow button and out it pops. Click Find Email and if it’ll go off and either find the exact email, or give you a good guess for what it might be.

An absolutely essential tool for any Recruiter, unless you have the email address of every candidate and hiring manager in your industry.

Rapportive

Another free plug in, this one we wouldn’t recommend using for every candidate as it’s that bit more time consuming. This one’s reserved for that incredible candidate, or hiring manager you know is about to release 20 jobs to the market and you just can’t get hold of him.

Here’s the link for Rapportive. With this one, you need a Gmail account.

You need to use this very useful tool from Rob Ousbey. Enter the details you know into the yellow boxes and hit enter. The guessed emails then appear in the green cells. Select them all, copy them, then paste them into the To section of a new Gmail email. Don’t send the email, simply hover over each one and you’ll see Rapportive pop up on the right hand side. Once you’ve landed on the correct email for that person (assuming they have a LinkedIn account), it will show their details on the right.

This doesn’t work every time, but as we say a very useful backup if the other plug ins fail you.

Connectifier

OK so this one isn’t free permanently, you get a free trial for about a month. But for that period of time, it’s definitely worth using.

You can download it here, then when the trial finishes up, either cough up or stop using it. The good thing about these email finders, is as soon as you have to pay for one, another one comes out of the woodwork that you can start using.

Between Prophet, Connectifier and Rapportive, you’ll be able to get hold of pretty much anyone’s email address. If that doesn’t quite do it for you then there’s always 360social.me, Connect6 and Lippl to try that do a similar thing. Enjoy!