Tag Archives: InMail

How to Get People to Respond to Recruiting Emails & Messages

When it comes to sourcing and recruiting, it’s gotten easier to find people but it’s gotten more difficult to get people to respond to emails, InMails, social messages and voicemails.

The poor quality and lack of sophistication of most recruiter messaging, along with rampant spamming, certainly hasn’t helped. Unfortunately and yet somewhat thankfully, the bar of what people expect to receive from recruiters has been set fairly low, so the opportunity for improvement is massive. The good news is that becoming more effective at getting people to respond to recruiting outreach efforts is relatively easy because marketing & advertising has already blazed the trail – sourcers and recruiters would do well to leverage what effective sales & marketing teams has been doing for decades.

In 2014 and 2015, I spoke at Talent 42, SOSUEU, and LinkedIn Talent Connect conferences on the challenges of getting people – especially “passive,” highly recruited talent – to respond to recruiter outreach efforts. The decks I used for the presentations were mostly images, so I decided to add text to the slides so that the core concepts could be understood by anyone whether they attended those conference sessions or not simply by viewing the presentation (I wish more presenters would do this!).

How to Get Unlimited LinkedIn InMails

 

Pile of Mail by faungg

What does LinkedIn’s new InMail policy mean for you? That depends on how effective your InMails are and the response rates you can achieve.

If you have a premium account with LinkedIn and haven’t been living under a rock, you are aware of LinkedIn’s InMail policy change which will, for most people, reduce the total number of InMails they are able to send.

However, their new policy does open up the possibility of unlimited InMails, provided you can achieve a 100% response rate.

Yes, it really is that simple. :)

Of course, even for folks with ridiculously effective messaging, there are a number of reasons why it is practically impossible to get a 100% response rate (e.g., people respond via email instead of through LinkedIn, people not logging into LinkedIn for long periods of time, people simply ignoring InMails, etc.).

However, if you can figure out how to get a much higher than average rate of response, you can actually end up with more InMails under LinkedIn’s new policy than the old.

Let me show you. Continue reading