LinkedIn Response Rates have declined dramatically, due to poor social media integrations
Really poor Social Media Integrations
LinkedIn’s integrations into new social media are stale, old, and not proactive. For example, a large part of the activity stream events going on inside the LI walled garden aren’t opened up through their API (even for paying subscribers) so that my activity stream within LI isn’t available to any of the other social networks. This is a brain dead idea imho.
LinkedIn is a Walled Garden and doesn’t share nicely
Because of their strong desire to keep LI a walled garden, the saturation is awful. What I mean is that more and more recruiters are pounding away at the same engineers in the same old ways (LinkedIn InMail and the old ‘introductions’). Consequently, response rates have come way down. It used to be the case that i could get a 10-15% response rate. Last year, these fell to half of that (approx 5-7%) and this year response rates are down even further, nearly 1-2%. Of course, a lot of this is due to the fact that more engineers are afraid of the broad financial uncertainties and are less interested in changing jobs, but after watching these response rates change over time, I feel there’s something else going on here, to explain this, and I believe it’s due to saturation.
Usage Models are Web 2.0; few newsfeed mashups
Most users only use LinkedIn a few times in any given year; however, as a recruiter, I use it a lot, many times per day. Their entire user experience and usage scenarios, for recruiters, are designed around ‘old school’ web 2.0 interactions (send an email, wait for a request) and aren’t even close to the newer more modern way of interacting with people through their news and activity feeds and through their social’ness’. Today, I’m much more likely to reach someone through a twitter or github reachout or even a follow or some kind of link, than with a LinkedIn InMail or referral.
