I had a great discussion with our team of recruiters regarding contacting potential candidates and/or networking using LinkedIn (LI). I thought I would share some ideas/tips I found very interesting!
The spirit of the conversation centered around the best ways to connect with folks you find within LinkedIn.
This led to the three most common ways to directly contact folks in LinkedIn and the “pro’s & con’s” of each method:
- Send Inmail – While Inmail is great, it is a paid for service and can become expensive. So if you want to use it, it will cost some extra $ during the year.
- Sending an Invitation to “link in” – LI only wants you to send an invitation to someone that you have a relationship with (past/present) and/or through an introduction with someone in your network. Of course while this can still work, it limits the number of people you could directly link in with outside of your network and without an intro. In addition, most of the recruiters on our team found introductions to be less effective and . . . less timely. While it might be a LI “no-no”, most of the recruiters said that they regularly send invitations as – “someone that they have done business with” – with great success and WITHOUT getting sent to the LinkedIn police
- Join a group and send a group member a message – Joining a group is great and will allow you to directly contact folks within that group. Of course best practices say that if you join the group solely to post jobs you are recruiting for (asking for something) WITHOUT providing information of value (making a deposit if you will) . . . you might get banned from the group or at a minimum, find that folks tune you out.
The fourth method that many subscribed to is finding someone in LI and then looking them up on other sites (Jigsaw, White Pages, etc.) and contacting them directly (via phone/email). The logic behind this tactic is two-fold:
- Many people don’t check LI all the time and/or don’t have LI emails sent to their personal email address so response time can be slow.
- So many recruiters are becoming LI recruiters that people are getting saturated with Inmail, Invitations and group messages. So to “separate” themselves from the other recruiters, they are going back to traditional means of connection.
- Linkedin can be very helpful; however, if the person you’re trying to find has left their company and you’re not able to find a home phone number.
Some other great points made during our conversation that I thought I would share:
- If someone is a power networker in LI (300+++) connections, you can almost guarantee they will respond. Those that have only a few connections probably don’t check as much and . . . they use traditional means to connect.
- LI provides such a wonderful amount of information to “personalize” your message so take advantage of it. Use the information on the potential candidate’s profile to make a connection, and quantify why connecting with you will benefit them and others in their network. If you send the canned LI message or a watered down version – - don’t expect great response rates or worse – - some unhappy peeps!
LinkedIn did not exist 5 years ago. It quickly has become an excellent recruitment tool. But as things change, you need to constantly be watching how others are using this tool and make sure you’re contributing to the conversation.





