10 Ways To Contact Candidates Without Relying on LinkedIn Inmails

This post originally appeared on SironaConsulting.com.

What would your manager say if you had a 75% failure rate? Would he or she be happy?

Turn it around the other way – you are successful 25% of the time – would that make it anymore palatable? Well, that’s what LinkedIn sales people are saying – that having a 25% success rate with InMails is good and aspirational. That’s a great sales message that fills you with confidence in a product, right?

My intent is not to bash LinkedIn here, I am just highlighting recent conversations some of their sales teams have had with my clients when they are trying to sell them products. I guess that they have at least been up front with the answer to the question, ‘what InMail response rates can I expect?’.

So just to be clear about this (if you are achieving 25% success rate), this means that for every 100 InMails you send to people on LinkedIn (candidates and company contacts), only 25 of them click on the email to open it – and that doesn’t necessarily mean they read it! Not brilliant when you know that your efforts are failing 75% of the time. What about the other 75 people in your search? How can you reach them? Do you even bother? (Sadly, I know a good number of recruiters that just work on bigger searches instead, playing a numbers game instead of going for the quality.)

So what can you do to contact these 100 people you have found in a search and want to reach out to?

Do you just hope, pray, or assume that these 100 people will buck the trend and actually all respond to you? After all, don’t they know who you are? Don’t they know what you have to talk to them about is critical to their future success? Dream on, it just won’t happen!

Many people I have asked these questions of (both candidates and company contacts) view InMails from LinkedIn as non-essential emails. Also, consider that while recruiters, business developers, and serial networkers might ‘live on LinkedIn’, most ‘normal’ people only login once a week or less. Add to that the number of daily emails that LinkedIn sends out – job changes, birthdays, job anniversaries, dog’s birthdays and local weather reports (ok, I am joking about the last two) – it’s not surprising that many people just don’t pay attention to your LinkedIn InMails.

So back to my question. What are you doing to reach out to the people you have worked so hard to identify?

~~Pray. Hope. Assume.~~

Here are 10 things you can do to find a way of making contact and engaging with these people:

Call them on the phone <shock! horror!>. You have seen their profile on LinkedIn, you know where they work, what their name is, and which department they work in. A click on the company name on their LinkedIn profile will take you to the company’s page with a phone number. Easy.
Try to get a referral. See if there is someone you know who also knows them (LinkedIn is good for this). They contact them for the best email or phone number. Alternatively, use the introduction route via LinkedIn (although this can take time to work).
Do a Google search for their name, they may have their own website or blog. Visit their ‘About.Me’ page and you will find contact details, or at the very least, a contact form to send them.
If you know where they work, it shouldn’t be too hard to find an email address for the person. Simply do this search on Google ”email * * companyname.com” using the url of the company as their likely email domain. You will see the email format. Copy it and run it through one of the main email validation tools like http://mailtester.com/.
Do a Google search for their name and find which other social networks they are on. Most social networks have a high page rank with Google so this shouldn’t be too hard. Check their bios on the social sites for contact details.
Message them via the social networks you find them on.
If they are on Google+, you can put an message right into their inbox. First add the person to a new Circle. Then post an update but only choosing the Circle you have just created as the recipient. Tick the small box that says ‘Send Email’ and that message will appear only in that persons GMail inbox.
Search for them on Skype. Open Skype, go to Contacts in the top toolbar and click Add Contact. Then do a search. You will have to send a request to connect, but you can add a message with the request so that may well work.
Try using one of the Chrome Apps that show you people’s other digital presence. Try Connect6, 360Social or Connectifier.
Do a graph search on Facebook to find them. Then spend a $1 to message them directly. This goes into their primary messages, and they will see it. Just be careful how you phrase the message as some people will find it invasive that you have messaged them this way. It’s still an uncommon approach but as long as you do it right and the message is tailored to your target person, it can work well.

And remember….

No praying, no hoping, and certainly no assuming.

99.9% of people have some form of digital footprint now – you have just got to find it! If the person you want to reach is worth it, then it is worth the effort, isn’t it?