From all the complaints we hear, we are amazed at the number of recruiters using LinkedIn Recruiter and paying an astronomical fee for it.

LinkedIn is fine. It has millions of tech profiles–many up to date. However, there are other means to reach these candidates besides using InMail. Plus, remember that while you visit LinkedIn daily and keep your profile up to date, tech people may not. In fact, 30% of them don’t even have a LinkedIn account. Shocking to you, but if you don’t need to look for a job, why have LinkedIn?

LinkedIn Recruiter is very stingy with InMail. At $150 per month, you don’t have a lot to waste. To make it worse, many LinkedIn users have opted out of receiving InMail messages in their personal email and don’t visit LinkedIn often, so your expensive InMail can just sit there in the LinkedIn message box, unread.

With InMail, you cannot comfortably send multiple emails to a passive candidate to get a response, but you definitely have the ability to do it with the right tools.

Chrome Extensions can find most emails on LinkedIn. For example, RocketReach is a great tool. It offers a free plan and it is good at finding business emails. If you prefer personal emails, developerDB can find them on over 60% of technical candidates on LinkedIn.

It is cheaper to own the email vs a one-time usage of LinkedIn InMail because you can reach out to someone multiple times with personal emails. Studies have shown that emailing someone multiple times results in 3X more responses. Although 30% of Tech Talent are not on LinkedIn––which you can easily find on GitHub or Stack Overflow with Chrome Extensions––one thing we can be assured of is how there are still millions of tech candidates on it. So just as you would go to Best Buy to check something but later buy it on Amazon, you should do the same with your recruiting. Check out profiles on LinkedIn and if you like a profile, grab their email! It most likely costs a lot less to get the email than send out one InMail, and you can personally email someone multiple times. How often have you responded to a marketing/sales email on the first try?