Search For Mutltiple Text Strings In Each Cell In A List

Hello, I need help with something, this is my first post. I am trying to match user names that i have for wireless phones, with names from our company HR feed and bring back what the employees ID # is. The problem is that the vast majority of the user names we have with the wireless vendors does not match the HR feed exactly. Therefore, when i did an initial VLOOKUP to grab the employee IDs, i was only able to find 4,500 out of 33,000.

What I would like to do is to be able to search for the last name, which would be the second text string in the cell, and once that matches check to see if the beginning of the first name matches. Example - Vendor name is - Chris White; HR name is Christopher White. Therefore i would want to look thru the list for white, and once it is found check to see if the beginning of the first text string is "Chri" or something like that, and then return the employee ID.

Can anyone help with this?

Also, would it be easier if I broke out first and last name into two separate columns?

Any help would be much appreciated!!

Thank you! This worked!

PS. My dad is from Killeen so we have spent a lot of time in Austin over the years, and almost nothing can top Rudy's when it comes to BBQ!