You've found the perfect candidate. No contact info. You know where they work, so their work email is one pattern away: is it jane.doe@, jdoe@, jane_doe@?
Formats are findable, because they leak
Companies publish employee emails constantly without thinking about it: press releases, conference speaker pages, academic papers, PDFs, "contact our team" pages, court filings. Each leaked address is a data point, and a few data points reveal the pattern. If you can find two or three real addresses at a company and they all look like first.last@company.com, you now know the format with reasonable confidence.
A quick manual version of this search:
"@companyname.com" email
Look for real addresses in the results and read the pattern off them.
Verify the domain actually receives mail
One more check separates pros from spray-and-pray: make sure you have the right domain. Companies rebrand, get acquired, and run separate mail domains ("nbcuni.com" for NBCUniversal). An address at a dead or wrong domain bounces no matter how right the format is. If mail to the domain doesn't work, no pattern will save it.
Why I don't guess — and won't
Plenty of tools "generate" emails: they take a name, squash it into six patterns, and hand you all six like a lottery ticket. I've come to a firm view after twenty years: fabricated emails are worse than no emails.
- Bounces hurt your sender reputation, which quietly hurts every future email you send.
- Guessing wrong at a small company means the office manager gets your misfired mail. That's your first impression now.
- Worst case, a guessed address reaches the wrong person with a similar name. Now you've shown a stranger a candidate's job search.
If no published format exists, the honest answer is: the company is too small to have leaked one — pick up the phone, or message the candidate where you found them. That's not a limitation; that's the craft telling you which channel to use.
The compressed version
- Hunt for real, published addresses at the company.
- Read the pattern from several examples, not one.
- Confirm the domain is the company's real, living mail domain.
- No published pattern? Don't invent one. Change channels.
Sourcer's Desk automates steps 1–3 — it shows you the published format with its sources, and when there isn't one, it says so honestly instead of handing you guesses. That last behavior is a feature. It took me a while to be sure of that, and I am.