Let's be honest: your Chrome browser is probably a mess of half-installed extensions you tried once and forgot about. Every recruiting blog pushes their favorite tools, most of which are redundant, outdated, or solving problems you don't actually have.

I'm going to save you time: here are the Chrome extensions that genuinely make recruiting easier, organized by what they actually do. No fluff, no affiliate links, just tools that work.

Contact Finding & Email Discovery

ContactOut - Finds email addresses and phone numbers for LinkedIn profiles. Click the extension while viewing someone's profile, and it pulls contact info from multiple databases. Accuracy is around 70-75% for email addresses, which beats manually hunting for contact info.

Pricing: Free tier gives you 40 emails/month. Paid plans start at $49/month for 300+ contacts.

Alternative: Hunter.io does similar email finding with a different database. Some people get better results with Hunter for certain industries. Free tier gives you 25 searches/month.

Lusha - Another contact finder with a strong B2B database. Particularly good for finding direct dials (phone numbers), which ContactOut sometimes misses. Accuracy ratings are solid—around 80% for verified contacts.

Pricing: Free tier gives you 5 credits/month. Paid plans start at $29/month.

Why these matter: Spending 15 minutes per candidate hunting for contact info is ridiculous when these tools do it in 5 seconds. Yes, you'll still need to verify some contacts, but the time savings is real.

LinkedIn Profile Exporting & Saving

Dux-Soup - Automates LinkedIn tasks like profile visiting, connection requests, and exporting profile data. The free version does basic profile viewing and tagging. Paid versions unlock automation features.

Important: LinkedIn's terms of service technically prohibit automation tools, and aggressive use can get you flagged. Use sparingly and don't go crazy with automation.

Pricing: Free for basic features. Pro plans start at $15/month.

Alternative: Phantombuster does LinkedIn automation plus a ton of other platforms, but it's more complex and technical. Only worth it if you're doing serious multi-platform prospecting.

Recruit'em - Lets you export LinkedIn profiles directly to your ATS or CRM. One-click save of candidate info without manual data entry. Works with most major ATS platforms.

Pricing: Part of Recruit CRM subscription (around $60/user/month).

Why these matter: Manually copying candidate info from LinkedIn to your ATS wastes hours every week. These tools make it one-click.

Boolean Search & Sourcing Help

Amazing Hiring - Aggregates candidate profiles from LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Behance, and other platforms into one search. You search once and get results from everywhere. Particularly strong for technical recruiting.

Pricing: Starts around $99/month per user.

SeekOut Chrome Extension - Similar concept—searches multiple sources and surfaces hard-to-find candidates. Also has diversity sourcing features that help find underrepresented candidates. Used by companies like Amazon and Microsoft.

Pricing: Enterprise pricing, typically $10K+ annually.

Why these matter: Searching 5 different platforms manually is tedious. These tools let you search once and aggregate results, which is how sourcing should work.

GitHub & Technical Sourcing

GitHunt - Shows trending GitHub repositories and developers right in your new tab. Useful for passively discovering developers working on interesting projects.

Pricing: Free.

Sourcegraph Browser Extension - Adds code intelligence to GitHub, making it easier to evaluate developers' code quality. You can see definitions, references, and how they structure projects without cloning repos.

Pricing: Free for public repositories.

Why these matter: If you recruit developers and you're not looking at their GitHub profiles, you're missing critical signal. These tools make GitHub evaluation faster and easier.

Productivity & Tab Management

OneTab - Collapses all your open tabs into a list, saving memory and preventing browser meltdown. When you're deep in a sourcing session with 40 LinkedIn profiles open, OneTab saves your sanity.

Pricing: Free.

Session Buddy - Saves and restores your browser sessions so you can pick up exactly where you left off. Particularly useful when you're juggling multiple searches or roles.

Pricing: Free with premium features at $3.99 one-time.

Why these matter: Recruiting involves ridiculous amounts of tab juggling. These tools keep you organized and prevent "wait, where was that candidate I was looking at 20 minutes ago?"

What You DON'T Need

Generic "AI assistant" extensions: Most are garbage that just scrape your data. If it promises to "automatically find the perfect candidate," it's overhyped nonsense.

ATS-specific extensions from vendors you don't use: Don't install Greenhouse's extension if you use Lever. Sounds obvious, but I've seen recruiters with extensions for 4 different ATS platforms they don't even use.

Anything that requires excessive permissions: If a recruiting extension wants access to "read and change all your data on all websites," that's a red flag. Stick with established tools from known companies.

How to Actually Use These

Here's the realistic workflow most productive recruiters use:

1. Start sourcing on LinkedIn with Boolean search
2. Use ContactOut or Lusha to grab contact info for promising candidates
3. Export promising profiles with Dux-Soup or Recruit'em to your ATS
4. For technical roles, check GitHub and use Sourcegraph to evaluate code quality
5. Use Amazing Hiring or SeekOut to find candidates from other platforms
6. Keep your tabs under control with OneTab or Session Buddy

The key is not using every tool at once—it's knowing which tool solves which specific problem.

The Bottom Line

You don't need 20 Chrome extensions. You need 3-5 that directly solve the bottlenecks in your workflow:

• If contact finding is your bottleneck: ContactOut or Lusha
• If profile exporting wastes your time: Dux-Soup or Recruit'em
• If multi-platform sourcing is tedious: Amazing Hiring or SeekOut
• If technical recruiting is your focus: GitHub tools like Sourcegraph
• If tab chaos is killing you: OneTab or Session Buddy

Install what you'll actually use, uninstall everything else, and watch your browser (and your productivity) improve.

Key Takeaways:

• ContactOut and Lusha for contact finding (70-80% accuracy)
• Dux-Soup for LinkedIn automation (use carefully to avoid TOS violations)
• Amazing Hiring and SeekOut for multi-platform sourcing
• GitHub tools essential for technical recruiting
• OneTab for managing dozens of candidate tabs
• Uninstall extensions you don't use—they slow your browser and create clutter
• Pick 3-5 tools that solve YOUR specific bottlenecks, not what some blog recommends