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Candidate information can be found in a lot of different places on the web. If you want to be successful as a recruiter you need to have the full view of a candidate before you reach out.
People on average have 7.6 different social media accounts. Cross referencing data is about referencing profile data from one person to find the information they have on other platforms they are active on. You want to learn as much as you can about a person before you decide to reach out to them.
This helps you to match your job to candidates based on complete and accurate information so you can do relevant and well informed outreach.
The challenge with cross referencing data however is that not everyone goes by the same name on different platforms. Sometimes they use a nickname, sometimes only their first name and sometimes their full name. In addition, for a lot of people there are dozens of other people with the exact same name.
Therefore you need more information than only the name to find someone on other platforms and you can help yourself by using the right tools.
Here's how to cross reference candidate information from different platforms using an engineer profile as an example.
When you find a profile on LinkedIn, in quite some cases there are links provided to other social media channels.
They can be either in the Contact Info or they are are somewhere in the descriptions provided by the candidate like in this case.
You can also use a contact finder or sourcing tool so you can find all the contact details and social links of the candidate in one place.
You follow one of the social links provided by the candidate, in this case GitHub.
Next to all the additional information you get to see, here you also find several other links that you haven't found yet on their LinkedIn page. That's helpful. You see the personal website provided and click on that link.
The personal website provides more information about the projects of the candidate.
You can use this as a reference to make a proper judgment weather the candidate is a good match.
In addition, here are his contact details provided so you can reach out to his preferred channels in case there seems to be a good match.
To find people across platforms and to build the full view of the candidate, you can guide yourself by following a few simple guidelines:
Find other social media links of a candidate based on their user name.
Find the right contact details of candidates like public email addresses, phone numbers and social media links (here's how to use contact finders).
Get updates on changes, mentions or posts of the candidate by using (here's an example how to use Google Alerts).
Extract (scrape) data at scale with these tools. Some data scrapers like Phantombuster also find contact details.
Google is still the most accurate search engine for most profiles.
Learn in our other blogs on cross platform sourcing how to search the different platforms out there.
Search billions of profiles through dozens of platforms.
