Buy mobiles for the ten you will ring, not the two hundred you sourced
A mobile number is the dearest contact detail you can buy, and the patchiest. Every provider prices it well above an email, fewer people have one on record, and a wrong one means a call to a stranger. None of that matters for the handful of people you will phone this week. It matters a great deal if you ask for the column on everything you sourced.
So this play does one job. You name the people you intend to call and it looks up a mobile for them. No emails, no profile data, no scoring. Recruiters ask for it in those words: here are my lists, phone numbers only.
It also runs differently from an email lookup. Work email and personal email each have a fixed provider chain that the agent calls as one tool. Mobiles have none. Each provider sells its mobile lookup as a separate paid call, so the agent puts them in an order for your run, tells you that order and which of them charge on a miss, and waits for your go-ahead.
What you get back
Your list, same rows and same order, with a mobile column filled in for the people you named. Beside each number: the provider it came from and what it cost.
Every other row says why it is empty: not selected, already held, no usable identifier, or tried and nothing found. Only the last of those means the person has no findable mobile.
Nothing is dialled, texted or loaded anywhere.
Variations worth knowing
Hiring managers instead of candidates. The same run works for client contacts, and one more lookup becomes available: BetterContact can return a phone alongside a work email. It is for work contacts only, so it is never part of a candidate run.
You need an address as well. Use get emails and mobiles for a list you already have, which picks the email channel first and treats the mobile as an add-on.
Where this goes wrong
Asking for the whole list to be safe. It is the most expensive way to run this, and most of the numbers will never be dialled. Cut the list first: a shortlist from the job spec tells you who is worth a call.
A direct line is not a mobile. One of the lookups returns direct dials as well as mobiles, so a number can ring a desk at an employer the person has left. Where the provider says which kind it is, the label stays on the row.
The right name, the wrong person. A row matched on a name and an employer is weaker than one matched on a LinkedIn URL, and with a common name it can be somebody else's phone. Those rows are marked.
No way to test a number. An email can be checked before you send. A mobile cannot. The only proof is the call.
