LinkedIn No Longer Linked with Hunter
After a seemingly happy two-year marriage, this dynamic duo has called it quits. Yesterday, the Hunter Chrome extension announced that is has shut down its LinkedIn integration because the social media platform no longer wants Hunter to “interact with their products, and asked [them] to remove it.”
This came as quite a blow to me. The Hunter Chrome extension has been my saving grace for all of two months and it has now been unceremoniously stripped from me, leaving me vulnerable and lacking of a way to get a hold of people easily and efficiently while expending zero to little effort.
Hunter is an extension that lets you find the people behind a website. Once downloaded, the Hunter icon takes residence in the top, right-hand corner of your browser. All you have to do is visit the website you’re looking for information on, and then click the icon. It will pull up a list of people that work for the company and their email addresses, all with handy-dandy quality scores to bolster your confidence in the accuracy of that email. This same concept was integrated with LinkedIn
When I first found out about the extension, I was extremely pleased with myself because I am rarely ever that tech-savvy. I began using it primarily on LinkedIn. Whenever I would search a person, the Hunter icon would appear below his or her image and I would be able to find their email from that. It saved me an unbelievable amount of time on a project that I was working on for a new client of ours.
Although the Hunter extension itself isn’t defunct, I think that the LinkedIn integration was a much more efficient way to conduct searches.
From a public relations perspective, I will say that I am impressed with Hunter’s response to the divorce. Not only do I think that they handled it professionally and as quickly as possible, they addressed all aspects of what this dissolution would mean for the extension moving forward. They were honest, acknowledging that the extension’s short-term successes will be hindered for a little while. To counteract this, Hunter will be giving its regular Doman Search option a major update, hoping to streamline the process.
And while it is a free extension to use for the most part (you are given 100 free searches per month), there are upgraded options that cost money. They factored this into their announcement, guaranteeing that all subscribers who will be affected specifically by this update will be refunded.
Although I am sad to have witnessed the conscious uncoupling of what I considered to be a dream team, I am satisfied knowing that I can still use the extension and that all of my questions were so graciously answered in Hunter’s announcement.
