How to find a person’s LinkedIn profile with their email address?

Finding someone’s LinkedIn profile can be useful for connecting with professional contacts or researching a potential employee, business partner, or vendor. While LinkedIn profiles are public, the platform doesn’t make it easy to search for a user by email address alone. However, with a few strategies and tools, you can use a known email address to track down the associated LinkedIn profile.

Why Would You Want to Find Someone’s LinkedIn Profile?

Here are some common reasons for wanting to find a LinkedIn profile with just an email address:

• Networking – You met someone professionally and got their business card with only their name and email. Finding their LinkedIn gives you more insight into their background and lets you connect.
• Sales prospecting – You’re researching a prospect company and want to learn about and potentially reach out to employees.
• Background checks – You want to verify credentials or learn more about a candidate, freelancer, vendor, etc. before hiring or doing business.
• Reconnecting – You lost touch with an old colleague or friend and want to get back in contact through LinkedIn.
• Research – As a recruiter, journalist, academic researcher, etc. you want to study LinkedIn profiles as part of your work.

In all of these cases, having just someone’s email address provides a starting point for tracking down their LinkedIn presence. The techniques below will cover how to go about this search.

Search LinkedIn for the Email Address

The first method to try is searching for the email on LinkedIn. While LinkedIn’s search doesn’t allow looking up members by email exclusively, you can still try entering the email into the main search bar.

Here are a few tips for searching by email on LinkedIn:

• Enter the email in quotes – This signals to LinkedIn you are searching for a specific phrase.
• Try variations – Try entering just the name or company portion of the email address (e.g. “john.smith” or “acmecorp”).
• Attempt partial matches – Don’t require an exact email match by only including part of the address.
• Try different keyword forms – Try “email:[email protected]” or “[email protected] email” in addition to a bare email search.

If the email address is associated with a LinkedIn profile, these searches may be enough to surface it in the results. This works best for more unique email addresses associated with an uncommon name or company. For more common names, it can be hard to identify the right profile among the many results.

When you do find candidate profiles this way, click through to verify if the email address is listed on the actual profile before assuming it’s a match. The email might also be visible in the profile URL, which usually contains a version of the LinkedIn member’s name.

Use Email Lookup Tools

If the LinkedIn search doesn’t reveal the right profile, the next step is to use email lookup tools. There are a number of free and paid services that can take an email address and search across social networks to find associated profiles.

Here are some top email lookup tools to research LinkedIn profiles:

• RocketReach – Searches over 30+ networks including LinkedIn. Free plan allows 5 searches per month.
• VoilaNorbert – Free social media lookup tool including LinkedIn. No account required.
• Email Searcher – Browser extension that searches LinkedIn and other sites. Free version has limited searches.
• Anymail Finder – Chrome extension similar to Email Searcher. Free plan allows 10 searches per month.
• Spokeo – Paid background check service that provides LinkedIn search. Subscription plans start around $20/month.

To use these tools, simply enter the email address you wish to search. The tools will crawl the web and LinkedIn looking for matches. Most provide summaries of the key profile details they are able to find, such as name, location, company, job title, etc. For the full profile, you will still need to click through to view it on LinkedIn.

Email lookups work well for more common names where searching LinkedIn directly returns too many matches. They can also help uncover personal profiles in addition to company email addresses. Just be aware these tools rely on profiling techniques like reverse email lookups which aren’t 100% accurate. Treat any results as clues requiring further verification.

Reach Out to the Email Address

If both search methods fail to uncover the LinkedIn profile you’re looking for, you can try the direct approach – reaching out to the email address.

Send a message asking if the recipient has a LinkedIn profile they would be willing to share with you. Explain why you are interested in viewing their profile, whether for business networking, background research, reconnecting, or another legitimate purpose.

To avoid coming off as invasive, keep the request professional and use an email account they are likely to recognize. Make it easy for them to simply reply with a profile link or “no I’m not on LinkedIn.”

This outreach method obviously requires you to already have a relationship of some sort with the email owner. Cold emailing strangers requesting LinkedIn access will likely not elicit any response. Nor is it a scalable solution if you’re researching multiple individuals. But for specific one-off lookups, a personalized request may get you the LinkedIn profile you seek.

Use the Email for Outreach

A final option is to connect with the desired LinkedIn member by using their email to send an InMail message. LinkedIn offers a feature called Relationships which looks at your contacts and activity to provide suggestions of 1st-degree connections.

If you upload contacts, connect your email, or follow relevant companies – you may see a message like “You have a relationship with John Smith via email at [email protected].” This means LinkedIn has associated that email with a profile.

You can then pay for an InMail to message that member directly. If they accept and respond, this both confirms the email association and gets you connected on LinkedIn.

The downside to this method is you have to pay for InMail credits and there’s no guarantee of a response. But in cases where the email address clearly belongs to the target member, it provides a way to engage them directly.

Use Advanced Search Operators

LinkedIn’s advanced search allows constructing more complex search queries using special operators. This can help narrow results and potentially surface profiles associated with a specific email.

Here are some operators that can aid an email-based search:

• Email – Search for profiles mentioning an email e.g. email:[email protected].
• Name – Search for mentions of a name associated with the email.
• Company – Search by the company domain name in the email.
• Group – Find profiles in groups relevant to the email domain.
• Location – Add a location operator if you know where the person is based.
• Language – Search by interface language set on the profile.

Boolean operators like AND and NOT can also help narrow the results. For example:

“John Smith” AND California NOT London

The advanced search is available from LinkedIn’s main search box. Click the options icon and select “Advanced” to construct a more complex query tailored to the email address attributes.

Use Google Search Operators

In addition to searching directly on LinkedIn, you can also leverage Google search operators as part of the email lookup process.

Google supports searching by specific keywords and attributes that may be associated with a LinkedIn profile page.

Useful operators include:

• site: – Restrict results to only LinkedIn.com pages.
• inurl: – Find profiles with a specific name in the URL.
• intext: – Search for keywords that appear on the profile page itself.
• intitle: – Match text in the