This is a follow-up and update with more numbers of an article published on LinkedIn a while back. If you want to read the first one.
Since my first article, Recruiters still spend a lot of time on LinkedIn to identify potential candidates. 🙂 The process stays the same for those who don’t use LinkedIn Recruiter: contact is made through an invitation.
The question remains: “Personalize the invitation by adding a personal note or not“? LinkedIn even tells us that: “LinkedIn members are more likely to accept invitations that include a personal note.”
True or False? We’re not going to believe it simply because LinkedIn writes it. This question has been around for a while. It’s answer, like Bigfoot, often heard of but never clearly seen.
Both theories make their stand. Even if the first round of numbers showed us wrong, we stay inclined to side with “sending a note”. But we keep relying on figures to help us choose sides.
So a while back we started measuring the acceptance rate. The first article we published was on the basis of 1468 invitations.
Today we have over 3 times that number to show a trend and present you some results.
We have now measured 4906 invitations.
49.3% of these (2419) were sent with a note, the rest 51.7% without a note.
Our target: Developers, Business Analysts, Project Managers, Architects; in short IT Oriented people active on LinkedIn.
The results have changed since our first measures:
The gap in acceptance between invites with or without messages has tightened. There is now a 4.44% difference.
It might not seem huge, but at this scale, it represents 217 people.
Of course this clearly a multifactor system. Our messages the time of day at which we sent the messages, location of the people etc…., have varied,
The gap tightens but it stays meaningful.
Do you think that tables will turn at one ?
What are your thoughts? How do you analyze this trend?