LinkedIn recently gave their site a much-needed redesign, reminding everyone that they very much are still in the social media game. One of the most notable features of their platform’s facelift is the upgrade InMail received.
InMail, as even the most novice LinkedIn users know, is the social media site’s messaging service. Whereas InMail used to be a page that functioned more closely to an email’s inbox folder, the messaging service now looks far more similar to a messaging service everyone inside and outside the professional world knows and loves (feels ambivalent about?): Facebook messenger.
With pop-up windows to feature conversations as they happen in real time, InMail is unabashedly taking a page out of Facebook’s wildly popular messaging service. Even with the fancy updates and the similarities to an already successful messaging platform, I’m here to break the bad news that it still won’t be enough in the war of recruitment marketing for LinkedIn to come out on top.
LinkedIn’s Riding Backseat On the Social Media Recruiting Caravan
As much as LinkedIn is starting to copy Facebook’s features (see also: trending stories), Facebook has been making even bigger strides to branch out into the recruiting space over the past year. The pinnacle of this was, of course, Facebook’s launch of job posting capabilities for pages. For the first time, employers could go on their Facebook pages and promote job postings directly on the page where candidates can right then and there apply.
But there’s some even more behind-the-scenes action taking place. Facebook recently launched lead generation ads, where you can customize fields for prospects to enter their information directly on Facebook when they see the ad. When our Facebook ad rep told me about this, of course my mind went directly to recruiting and I was told they are currently working on integrating ATS’s into the lead generation ad tool. This means you can go a step further in promoting jobs to candidates on Facebook by letting them directly apply.
Crazy stuff, but I digress.
What does this all have to do with messaging systems?
The fact of the matter is, as LinkedIn clings to the precipice of the social media grave, Facebook is making more and more elbow room for themselves in LinkedIn’s niche, pushing LinkedIn dangerously closer to the edge.
As a recruiter, this info should matter to you, particularly in regards to how you’re connecting with candidates.
InMail has always been the standard for recruiting candidates, and it’s now even better, but LinkedIn knows what their doing in terms of ripping off Facebook’s interface for messaging. Now it’s time for you to follow in LinkedIn’s suit and put your eyes on Facebook messenger.
Even if Facebook wasn’t making all the strides they are in the talent acquisition space, I’d still urge you to turn towards Facebook messenger, and it boils down to one simple statistic: on a monthly basis, Facebook averages four times the number of active users that LinkedIn does. This is bolstered only more by the fact that Facebook now is coming in with TA bats swinging.
More people to contact = more reason for you to be there, particularly when considering InMail’s low average response rate.
Many recruiters are thrown off by the idea of recruiting through Facebook. LinkedIn is home and it’s a lot more comfortable sending InMail after InMail than taking a chance on messaging a prospective candidate on the new, uncharted recruiting territory of Facebook. I say, take that leap and give it a go.
What better way to reach those golden passive candidates (and any candidates for that matter) than on a platform where there’s more of them, they’re more active, and the response rate of messages is far higher?