Can LinkedIn Fix the InMail Response Problem?

As any recruiter will testify, reaching out to a potential candidate through LinkedIn can be frustrating and sometimes fruitless, as top talent are inundated with dozens (sometimes hundreds!) of messages and aren't motivated to sift through the noise. In this well-received Quora post, Entelo's Jon Bischke explains how LinkedIn might tackle this issue.

I think LinkedIn has a great opportunity to solve the InMail response challenge that many recruiters are facing. The answer can be found right here on Quora. :)
Quora has done a brilliant thing with their Ask to Answer feature in that they are essentially metering out how many questions a certain person can be asked to answer with a variable pricing mechanism. Want to ask Michael Wolfe a question? No problem. But it will cost you. Significantly more than the average Quoran.

LinkedIn has a similar scenario. People who list in-demand skills such as Ruby on Rails, Javascript, etc. are getting hammered by recruiters on LinkedIn. Many of these folks have simply stopped responding to InMails. The lowered response rate frustrates recruiters and their response is to...wait for it...send an even greater quantity of InMails.

But what if InMail worked like Quora's Ask to Answer feature whereby the most coveted folks on LinkedIn required more credits to contact? What you could potentially achieve is a dynamic equilibrium where recruiters could still get through to everyone but those folks who were highly sought-after didn't get slammed.

What this would also do is require recruiters who were thinking about reaching out to in-demand folks to think about whether they truly wanted to reach out to a certain person and, if they did, to craft a personalized message (something engineers mention they prefer in this Semil Shah TechCrunch piece: Iterations: Let’s Hear From Developers In “The War For Talent” | TechCrunch). After all, if you're going to burn 20 InMail credits reaching out to that rock star Scala engineer, you're probably not going to send him a generic message...

View the full post on Quora here.