Because your use case is unique to your business, it can be tricky to determine which filters in Discover will best fit your search.
This guide will help you further tailor your search and improve your results. If you need help getting started with Discover, you can view our full tutorial here and come back to this guide if necessary.
Choosing your first Hunter Discover filters
First, we're going to begin by selecting a couple of simple filters as a starting point for our search.
You can select any filters you'd like as you're following along, or you can follow along with me.
Filters selected for this round include:
Industry: Dentists
Location: United States
Results for this round: 1,638 companies
As we can see, using only these 2 filters provides a limited number of results. In this case, we can use different filters to alter results.
Use the AI assistant to target companies
You can also use the Discover AI Assistant as a quick starting point for your filters.
Simply describe the companies you’re targeting, for example “Dentists in the United States” or “SaaS companies in Germany hiring engineers”, and Discover automatically applies the matching filters, including job openings. You can then adjust the filters manually, and Discover may suggest more filters to refine your results.
💡 Describe companies, not people!
Discover finds companies first, then the people who work there. You can target specific roles afterwards with the people filters.
Adding filters to broaden results
Every industry is different, so we recommend trying multiple filter combinations while tailoring your search.
💡 Don't worry, no credits will be charged as you tailor your search.
You will only be charged once email addresses are retrieved from your results, so try as many as you'd like while experimenting!
First, notice how we've entered only "Dentists" within the industry filter and nothing else.
While that's a great start, some businesses in this category may identify themselves differently depending on their overall business scope.
For example, some dental practices could be listed under the Hospitals and Healthcare industry filter, or the Medical Practices industry filter.
Filters selected this round include:
Industry: Dentists, Hospitals and Healthcare, Medical Practices
Location: United States
Results for this round: 354,831 companies
Adding those 2 filters already improves our results quite a lot, but it can also pollute our results with companies that don't quite match what we're looking for.
ℹ️ Not every region is available in the Headquarters location filter. If you pick one that isn’t supported, Discover shows a message explaining why instead of returning no results. Try a broader area, such as the state or country.
Adding filters to refine results
To help broaden your results while still narrowing down your search criteria, you can use the Keywords filter to add on keywords relevant to your search.
To give you an example, you can see if we use only the medical practices filter we would get a lot of doctors offices that practice other types of medicine.
If you then also layer on the "dentist" and "dental care" keyword filters on top, we'll start seeing results that more closely match what we're looking for.
Filters selected this round include:
Industry: Dentists, Hospitals and Healthcare, Medical Practices
Location: United States
Keywords: Dentist, Dental Care
Results for this round: 691 companies
Increasing relevant results
The keywords that are used to describe a company can vary even within an industry, so we recommend using as many keywords as you can think of to help increase the results available
💡 As a tip: If you aren't sure which keywords to use, we recommend taking a look at a desired company in Discover to see which keywords we've used for them, and then adding those keywords to your current search.
We'll practice this now by brainstorming more keywords to increase the number of dental offices we're retrieving from Discover.
Feel free to add as many keywords that are relevant to your search as you can think of, you can always adjust them later!
If you find that your results are decreasing instead of increasing on this step, please be sure you have the "Match ANY of these" option selected as shown here:
After entering in those keywords, our results have now increased substantially from where we started with our first search:
Filters selected this round include:
Industry: Dentists, Hospitals and Healthcare, Medical Practices
Location: United States
Keywords: Dentist, Dental Care, Dentists, Oral Health, Oral Care, Dental, Dental Services, Pediatric Dentistry, Preventative Dentistry, Dentistry, Orthodontics
Results for this round: 14,356 companies
Now, we have a full list of relevant companies that we can get started prospecting into!
Additional filters for finding emails
To find emails for all companies in your results, or only the ones you select, use Find all people (or Find people for selected companies). You can then filter the contacts before revealing them.
💡 Note: The filter panel described below also applies when using Find People from Leads → Companies. Whether you launch Find People for a single company, selected companies, or your full list, the same filters — including Job title, Department, Verification status, and more — are available.
Available filters for finding emails in bulk
Simply click on the "Find all people" button to search for email addresses for all companies in your list.
After clicking the Find all people button, a new window will appear, allowing you to filter the available email addresses according to your preferences:
Department: focus on teams such as Marketing, Sales, HR, Finance or Engineering. You can choose one or multiple departments.
Seniority: focus on contacts at the right level. Seniority levels follow LinkedIn’s standard ladder, from entry-level up to owner. You can choose one or multiple levels.
Job title: target specific roles or keywords. You can choose one or multiple job titles.
Verification status: Valid, Accept all or Unknown.
Show only results with: a full name, a job title or a phone number. Phone numbers are only linked to personal emails, not generic ones.
Location: filter contacts by where they’re based. Include or exclude continents, business regions, countries, states or cities.
Saved leads: hide contacts you’ve already saved to your Leads. This is turned on by default.
Limit people per company: set the maximum number of contacts returned for each company (1 to 100).
Email source: show all emails, only emails found publicly, or only inferred emails (built and verified from the person’s name and the company’s domain).
Use the tabs to choose which emails you see:
People: professional emails of people inside an organization, like personal.name@hunter.com
Decision makers: contacts identified as the most likely decision makers at their company. Learn more
Generic: role-based addresses like contact@ or support@
Available filters for finding emails for single companies
By clicking on any company row, you open the company profile. You'll see a section for email addresses linked to these companies. You can simply reveal the email address of a specific company contact by clicking on the "Reveal" button.
You also have the option to view emails based on their category: People, Decision makers, or Generic:
To get more specific, you have the option to add additional filters such as:
Department: Select specific departments
Job title: filter by specific job titles
Show only results with: phone numbers, full names, or positions
Verification status: Filter emails by their current verification status.
Location: filter by lead location
Saved leads: hide all previously saved leads
To sum things up:
💡 Remember, you can try as many different variations of the search as you'd like, and keywords aren't the only way to increase results, so we encourage you to try any of the filters you see that are applicable to your use case.
If you'd like, you can now start subtracting some filters or adding in exclusions to refine your search further.
As we mentioned, this can be done as many times as you'd like at no cost, and you can always save different variations of your searches for later as shown here:
💡 If you have any questions, or if you'd like some suggestions on the filters would be best for your search, please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team at contact@hunter.io.