Recruiters using the paid Recruiter account on the LinkedIn social network can send direct messages (InMail) containing job offers to all the network's users. Most of the recruiters have correctly realized that sending targeted, personalized offers is much more effective than distributing one mass generic offer to hundreds or thousands of LinkedIn users. Approximately 2 per cent of recruiters, however, still prefer bulk InMails which get few responses and annoy the addressees. Users receiving such impersonal junk mail then tend to stop reading relevant offers from other, reputable recruiters. LinkedIn is trying to prevent this from happening by changing the terms of use for the Recruiter service.
Back in January, LinkedIn already imposed a charge on sending bulk messages to group members. From August, the following measures will apply:
- Users of the Recruiter account whose response rate to 100 or more InMails sent within 14 days remains below 13%, will be informed of this and get recommendations on how to improve their response rate.
- If they continue to have a response rate of lower than 13%, sending mass e-mails will be disabled for 14 days.
- If they reach a higher response rate after 14 days, they will regain the opportunity to send messages in bulk. If not, they will be able to send only one-to-one messages for another 14 days.
"More than 98 percent of Recruiter users won’t be impacted by this InMail policy change. Yet everyone will benefit from it," says LinkedIn on its blog.
Do you think that LinkedIn will benefit from this change? Can it protect users from impersonal job offer spam? Will it increase the users' interest in relevant job offers?
-Kk-