Recruiting at Scale: How to Enrich Candidate Contact Info Without Leaving Google Sheets

Sourcing candidates from LinkedIn is table stakes. Getting their contact information is where most recruiting workflows stall.

LinkedIn InMail has response rate issues and credit limits. Waiting for a connection request acceptance delays outreach. And manually hunting for personal emails costs time that should go toward actually speaking to candidates.

This post covers how to enrich LinkedIn sourcing lists with direct contact information — emails and phone numbers — using Google Sheets, without a third-party ATS or expensive platform license.

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The Problem With LinkedIn-Only Recruiting Outreach

LinkedIn is not built for high-volume outreach. The platform intentionally limits how much recruiters can contact people they’re not connected to:

• InMail credits are capped by subscription tier (typically 30–150/month on Recruiter Lite)
• Connection request limits — LinkedIn applies usage limits to accounts it flags as high-volume
• Response rates — InMail open and reply rates are lower than direct email for most candidate profiles

Direct email outreach, by contrast, lands in a candidate’s personal or work inbox where it’s more likely to be read on their timeline. For senior candidates who don’t actively monitor LinkedIn messages, direct email is often the only path to a timely response.

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What Enrichment Returns for Recruiting Use Cases

The LinkedIn Enricher add-on, when run against a list of candidate profile URLs, returns:

• Work email — the email address associated with their current or most recent employer
• Personal email — less common, but some providers return this for profiles where it’s indexed
• Phone number — available for a subset of profiles; useful for warm outreach

For recruiting specifically, the email hit rate on candidate profiles is typically:

Candidate profile type	Email hit rate
Senior engineers, product (US)	65–78%
Executive (VP, C-suite)	58–70%
Recent graduates / entry level	45–60%
EMEA candidates	50–65%
Actively looking (career transitions)	60–72%

Candidates who are actively looking and have recently updated their profiles tend to be better indexed, which slightly improves hit rates on actively-sourced candidate lists.

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Setting Up the Recruiting Workflow

Stage 1: Build Your Sourcing List in Google Sheets

Export your LinkedIn search results (or Sales Navigator search) into a Google Sheet. You want at minimum:

• Candidate name
• Current company
• Current title
• LinkedIn profile URL

Keep the list focused. 50–150 candidates per enrichment batch is ideal for review quality. Enriching 500 candidates at once is technically fine, but reviewing that many results for quality at the same time creates a different bottleneck.

Stage 2: Clean the Profile URLs

Before enriching, spend 2–3 minutes on cleanup:

[ ] Remove company page URLs (linkedin.com/company/...) — these return no results
[ ] Remove duplicate profile URLs
[ ] Filter out rows where the LinkedIn URL is missing
[ ] Confirm all URLs are in linkedin.com/in/... format

Stage 3: Run Enrichment

1. Open Extensions → LinkedIn Enricher → Open
2. Configure API keys in Settings (Datagma, LeadMagic, or both)
3. In the Enrich tab, select your LinkedIn URL column
4. Choose primary provider — for recruiting, LeadMagic tends to perform slightly better on EMEA and career-transition profiles
5. Enable fallback for the secondary provider
6. Click Enrich

Stage 4: Review and Segment Results

After the run, segment your candidates:

Segment	Action
Email found + active role match	Priority outreach track
Email found + job change (stale?)	Verify email before sending
No email, phone available	Phone or LinkedIn outreach
No contact found	LinkedIn InMail or re-enrich in 60 days

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Direct Email vs. InMail: When to Use Each

This isn’t an either/or decision. For a 100-candidate list, a smart outreach strategy uses both:

Email (when address found and verified):

• First touch for candidates with strong profile-to-role matches
• Follow-up 5–7 days after first contact
• More effective for mid-career candidates who monitor work email closely

LinkedIn InMail (when no email found, or as complementary touchpoint):

• Candidates where enrichment returned no result
• Executive-level contacts who may not respond to cold email
• Supplement to email when candidate hasn’t replied after 2 touchpoints

Phone (when number available and role is high-priority):

• Senior or specialized roles where finding the right person is worth a direct call
• Time-sensitive searches with short hiring timelines

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GDPR and Data Privacy for European Candidates

If you’re sourcing candidates based in the EU, enrichment and direct contact requires care:

Legitimate interest is the most commonly cited lawful basis for B2B recruiting outreach — contacting someone about a professional opportunity they may genuinely be interested in. However, legitimate interest is not automatic. You need to be able to demonstrate a genuine interest assessment and ensure you’re contacting people in a reasonable way.

Candidate data handling:

• Don’t store enriched contact data longer than necessary
• Provide a way for candidates to request removal of their data
• Don’t use personal emails for recruiting outreach without a stronger justification

For a full breakdown, see our LinkedIn Enrichment and GDPR Compliance guide →.

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Candidate List Structure: Before and After Enrichment

Before enrichment — your sheet has:

• Name, title, company, LinkedIn URL (from export)
• No direct contact information

After enrichment — your sheet has:

• All of the above, plus:
• Email address (work email, where found)
• Phone number (where available)
• Which provider returned the data
• When the enrichment ran

This is enough to load into a basic email outreach tool or to hand off to a recruiter for personalized manual outreach.

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What This Workflow Won’t Replace

This is a contact-finding tool, not an ATS. It won’t:

• Track candidate pipeline stage
• Log communications
• Schedule interviews
• Manage job requisitions

For agencies and in-house recruiting teams doing high-volume searches, enrichment fits between “sourcing” and “outreach” in the workflow. It feeds data into whatever tool you use for the actual recruiting process — whether that’s an ATS, a CRM, a sequencer, or a simple email inbox.

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For guidance on enrichment hit rates by industry and how to handle not-found rows, see LinkedIn Contact Enrichment Guide for B2B →

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Start enriching your candidate sourcing lists. LinkedIn Profile Enricher for Google Sheets — install free →