Twenty years of sourcing leaves you with a short list of things that actually earn their place, and a long list of things that don't. This is the short one. No affiliate links, nobody paid to be here, and where a tool has a catch I say so.
Learn the craft
- The Sourcer's Desk Guide — The full guide that ships inside the extension: x-ray searching, the area-code trick, and the techniques that separate sourcers from searchers. Free, no signup.
- Google's search operator reference — The primary source. Worth ten minutes of your life — most “advanced boolean” content is a restatement of this page.
- Dean Da Costa — The Search Authority tools list — The deepest free-tools arsenal in the trade — Chrome extensions, people search, resume databases, and downloadable cheat sheets, maintained for years by a working sourcer.
Communities and newsletters
- Recruiting Brainfood — Hung Lee's weekly curation. If you read one thing in this industry, read this. Free, and it puts you six months ahead of the conversation.
- Brainfood Larder — Sourcing — The link library behind the newsletter, hundreds of sourcing links deep. A rabbit hole with a floor.
- ERE — More data and strategy than tactics. Good for the “why is hiring like this right now” question.
Finding contact information, honestly
- Email-Format — Look up the pattern a company actually uses, with the published examples it inferred them from. Exactly the right shape: it shows you evidence, not a generated guess.
- Hunter — Same idea with a bigger index and a free tier. Check the confidence score and the sources, not just the address.
- RocketReach — A large contact database with a limited free tier. Useful when the published-format trail runs cold; paid beyond a handful of lookups.
- A word on browser-extension contact finders — Several popular ones work by running on linkedin.com while you browse — reading profiles, injecting buttons, sometimes visiting profiles on your behalf. That is the specific category LinkedIn restricts accounts over. I won't tell you what to install, but I'll tell you where the risk lives, and it isn't in searching Google. Full explanation here.
Where candidates actually are
- GitHub — And personal sites on
github.io, where a lot of developers keep the resume they actually maintain. - Stack Overflow user profiles — People who answer questions well, publicly, with a track record you can read.
- GitLab — Smaller than GitHub, and therefore quieter.
- Kaggle — Where data scientists show their work rather than describe it.
- Behance — Designer portfolios — and note it's behance.net, not .com. A typo'd
site:search returns nothing and looks like an empty market. - Dribbble — More designer portfolios. Three b's — the spelling trips up everyone at least once.
- Wellfound — Startup talent, many of whom keep a thin LinkedIn on purpose.
- Google Scholar — For research and technical hires: papers list affiliations, co-authors, and often contact details.
- Meetup — Group member and speaker lists are public, local, and self-selected for people who show up.
Tools I build and give away
- Sourcer's Desk — My own Chrome extension. Builds x-ray searches from plain words, captures candidates into client projects, and finds published email formats. It never touches your LinkedIn account, and it never invents an email address. Free.
- This blog — One practical post at a time, drawn from twenty years of doing this work.
Something missing?
If you run something recruiters would genuinely thank me for listing, tell me: support@sourcerdesk.com. I read everything, I list what's useful, and I don't trade links.