A recruiting team sources candidates with verified work emails

The situation

Picture a recruiting team — agency or in-house — working a hard search: a specific role, a specific seniority, at a specific kind of company. The candidates they want aren't applying; they have to be found and contacted directly, and email is the channel that reaches them without burning an InMail quota or getting lost in a LinkedIn inbox.

The team's old pipeline was a patchwork: source profiles in one tool, guess or look up emails in another, verify in a third — with candidates falling through the cracks at every seam.

The pain: finding an email is easy — trusting it is not

Candidate email data fails recruiters in three compounding ways. First, staleness: people change jobs, and an address found last year may point at an employer the candidate left. Second, the multi-role problem: strong candidates often hold several current positions — a day job plus a board seat or side project — and a lookup tool that picks the wrong one sends your pitch to an inbox the candidate never checks. Third, verification: candidates at enterprise companies, universities, and large organizations often sit on catch-all mail servers, which most verification tools mark "risky" and tell you to skip — top talent, skipped by tooling.

The stakes are first impressions. It takes 3-4 emails to get responses from top talent, and if the first one bounces, the candidate is lost before the conversation starts — while the bounces quietly damage the team's sender reputation. The team needs addresses it can trust before hitting send; that's the job of a verified email finder.

The workflow, step by step

1. 1

   Define the candidate pool in People Search

   The recruiter starts in People Search, which covers 500M+ professionals and filters in real time by title, seniority, department, and company. A search like "senior backend engineers at mid-size fintech companies" becomes a concrete list of people. Teams that already have a sourcing list can start from a CSV upload or imported HubSpot records instead of a fresh search.

2. 2

   Run Email Finder on the saved search

   Email Finder runs on the saved People Search results — which is how it knows the exact role being targeted. That matters for candidates who hold more than one current position (a day job, a board seat, a side project): Enrichley uses the title the recruiter searched for to pick the right current role and finds the email at that company, never attaching one company's domain to a role at a different company.

3. 3

   Every email is verified — never guessed

   Each address is verified in real time, catch-all included, and only the ones confirmed deliverable come back. That last part is what makes enterprise candidates reachable: large organizations often run catch-all mail servers, the addresses other tools mark "risky" and skip. And when there's no usable business domain for a person, Enrichley skips them rather than fabricating an address — no guessed emails ever enter the outreach list.

4. 4

   Pay only for valid results

   Email Finder charges 3 credits per valid email; not-found, skipped, and errored lookups cost nothing. Credits are reserved for the batch up front and every miss is refunded automatically, so the sourcing budget tracks verified candidates found — not attempts.

5. 5

   Export and start the outreach

   The verified results export to CSV, Clay, or HubSpot — or write straight back to contacts. The recruiter starts sequences knowing every address was confirmed deliverable before the first email went out.

The outcome

The outreach list the team ends up with is one it can trust: every address verified before the first email goes out, matched to the role the recruiter actually searched for — not a stale employer or the wrong one of a candidate's several jobs. The first touch lands, which is exactly where recruiting outreach is won or lost.

The team also reaches candidates other recruiters never contact — the ones behind enterprise catch-all domains that competing tools mark "risky" and drop. And because misses cost nothing, sourcing spend maps to verified candidates, not lookup attempts. The broader playbook is on our recruiters use-case page.