Want to find out someone’s place of employment? Maybe you need to track down a long-lost friend, or you’re trying to do a little background check on your online match.

You can do all this and more with the methods below that help you track down someone online.

1. Check LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with more than 750 million members by 2022. The platform serves as the public digital equivalent of a resume and contains a wealth of information about each user, including their workplace name and contact details, which makes LinkedIn a great place to start your search.

If your target has a profile on this site, chances are you are able to find out where they work. So how do you find their LinkedIn profile? There are two ways you can try:

a) Search LinkedIn Profile by Names

You can also find someone on LinkedIn by name, although this could take a while, especially if you’re looking up a common name. Here is how to do it:

1. Log into your LinkedIn account.
2. On the search bar, type the person’s full name and press Enter.
3. Click the People tag to display only the results for profiles, then click All filters to use Advanced filters to narrow down the results.
   For example, if you know the previous workplace, schools they went to, or their approximate location, add these pieces of information to remove irrelevant results.

b) Find LinkedIn Profile by Email

If you know the person’s email address, you might be able to locate their profile using that information. Although LinkedIn doesn’t let you search for users by email address directly using its search bar, here is what you can try:

1. Log in to your LinkedIn account and connect it to your Microsoft Outlook account.

2. Go to Outlook and log into your account.

2. Click the People option on the left panel, then click New contact.

3. Fill in the First Name as you want, then click Add more and select Email address.

4. Fill in the email address and click Create.

5. Click the contact you created, then click LinkedIn to see if there’s any LinkedIn profile associated with the email address.

2. Run A Background Check

A background check tool is usually a paid service that allows you to search for detailed information about someone like their employment history, arrest records, and contact details by inputting their full name or phone number.

If you’re willing to pay to find the information, you can try a background check with TruthFinder, Intelius, or PeopleFinders.

a) TruthFinder

Truthfinder is one of the best background check tools and the search is more thorough than most of its competitors. It collects a wealth of information on people from various resources. You can look up someone by the information you already know about them, e.g. their name, phone number, or address.

Step 1. Go to TruthFinder’s official website.

Step 2. Type the person’s full name and click Search.

Step 3. Wait for TruthFinder to search for the person’s job information, along with additional information like their education history, social media profiles, relatives, phone number, email address, court records, address, and more.

Under BUSINESS, you might be able to find out which company the person works for and the company address.

b) Intelius

Intelius does an awesome job at finding people’s background information. Controversial yet completely legal, this tool gathers information from all over the web and places it in one convenient place, including people’s employment history, address history, contact details, criminal records, social profiles, and more. To use this tool:

Step 1. Go to Intelius’ official website.

Step 2. Type the person’s full name and click Search.

Step 3. You’ll be able to view a report that contains data from public records resources.

c) PeopleFinders

PeopleFinders is another behemoth of a background check tool. Much like TruthFinder listed above, this site leverages millions of data points and dozens of data sources and lets you dig up a wealth of information.

You can get employment details, contact information, criminal records, and more with the PeopleFinders background check.

Step 1. Go to PeopleFinders’ official website.

Step 2. Enter the person’s name and click Search.

PeopleFinder will deliver a report that might include information like their job history, address, email, relatives, etc.

3. Google It

Google is the world’s most powerful search engine and one that scours a tremendous number of web pages at once. It allows you to find people with limited information like just their name, phone number, address, email, etc. And it even provides a reverse image lookup tool that lets you find people online with just a single picture!

To see if you’re able to track down the person on Google, follow the steps below:

Step 1. Open up Google

Step 2. Type in everything you know about the person in keyword format. For example:

"John Smith" Los Angeles Accountant

Quotation marks around the name will tell Google to search for the specific phrase, which will help narrow down your search and bring up identifiable results.

You can also try using alternative search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo to refine your search and access deeper results from the web.

4. Check Their Social Media Posts

Social Media can also be a good option to dig up information on people since many people enjoy sharing their lives there.

Facebook is the most popular social network, and the profiles on the platform are relatively complete compared with others, so you should probably start there. 

You can also check the person’s Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and other social networks they are active in. While people may not explicitly specify their workplace on those sites, they may accidentally share this information by taking pictures at work or mentioning it in their comments.

If you haven’t already connected to the person on any social media, check out our guide on How to Find Someone’s Social Media Accounts.

5. Use Your Connections

Do you know anyone who might know the person’s workplace details? Maybe a mutual friend, a classmate, or a family member of theirs?

Try listing out any possible mutual contacts or anyone that could be related to this person and ask them discreetly about the person’s employment.

6. Hire a Private Investigator

The last resort is hiring a private investigator if finding the person’s workplace is important to you.

Depending on what state you would like the investigation conducted in, you might want to call the state’s division of licensing to make sure the investigator of your choice has a license to operate before hiring.

If you don’t know how to find a good investigator and you want guaranteed results, consider hiring a search specialist from Social Catfish. The experts at Social Catfish are trained in tracking down people using software and technology used by the FBI.

Wrapping Up

There are many ways you can try to find out where someone works, from a regular web search to using a professional people search tool. If the person isn’t active online and there is no way to trace their digital footprints, consider hiring a private investigator if hunting down the person is imperative.

Hopefully, this post pointed you in the right direction for tracking down someone’s workplace. Feel free to share your thoughts with us and thanks for reading!