Sending messages and saving message templates in LinkedIn

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Sending messages and saving message templates

In this movie, I want to get familiar with the tools for sending messages to candidates that you've found in your searches. And of course, there are a few ways of getting to the messages tools in Recruiter. But I want to start in a project. So I'm going to go into my projects menu here, I'll go straight to my Graphics Lead project, where I have five candidates that I've picked out as people that I want to get in touch with. Now, the tools are going to be the same whether you're on a clipboard or a search results screen, or here, on the projects screen. If I want to send a message to only one person, you'll see there's a button next to their name that says "Send InMail".

Or, you can click on their name to view their profile, and then you'll see this button here to Send InMail. I'm going to click on that. LinkedIn has a system for limiting unsolicited messages from people who are not connected on LinkedIn. That system is the InMail. As a user of LinkedIn Recruiter, you have an allotment of InMail credits. You could use an InMail credit to contact a LinkedIn user that you're not connected to. If that person responds to your message, you get that InMail credit back.

If they never respond, then you've spent the credit. This is only for users that are not already connected. So, you can see here that if I were to send a message to Sarah, it would use one of my 449 InMail credits. But I'm going to cancel this for a moment, I'm going to go back to my projects, and I'm going to go to Uri's profile here, click to send him an InMail, and you can see that this is going to be a free InMail. This is not going to charge against my InMail credits, and that's because I happen to already be connected with Uri on LinkedIn.

So, for people that you're already connected with, you can send free messages. But, if you're searching for new candidates, it's very likely that you will be not connected already, and you'll need to use your InMail credits. So, from here, I could send this InMail message, but I want to cancel this just by hitting the "X" up at the top of this message. I'm going to go back to my projects list. So, another option here on the projects list is that I could select one or more people by clicking on the checkbox next to their name. So, I could click these one by one, or it might just be easier to click this box up at the top that selects all of them.

And again, you can do this on the clipboard or a search results screen as well. Once I have these people selected, there's a button up at the top that says "Message". I'm going to click on that, and now I can send one message to all of these people at the same time. Now it's interesting to point out here that four of these people are going to cost me InMail credits, but, of course, Uri is listed here for a free InMail, so it's not going to charge me to contact him. So, from here, the process is very much like sending a regular email message.

I'm going to fill in the subject and the body of my message. OK, so I've filled in a subject, and I've filled in the body of my message. There's a pre-made menu here for Salutation, so I might choose something like this, and it'll fill in the first name for each of these people when it sends those messages. There's also a signature line down here at the bottom, and I can hit the little pencil button next to that, and I can edit my signature. So, maybe I don't want my email address to show up here, but I do want my job title to show up here.

Whatever you think is appropriate for your introductory messages, you can set that, hit Save, and now that will go into any of the messages that you send here on Recruiter. You've got an option here to attach a file if you want to. If you are actually recruiting for a specific job, you could attach the job description, for example. Then we have the Send button here, but before we look at that, I want to go up to this button up here in the top right, this one that just looks like a little page, and I'm going to click on that.

Before I send this message, what I'm going to want to do is save it as a template. If you spend the time writing the perfect introduction message, you can save it as a template, so that you can reuse it for future communications. So, to save the template, before I send the message, I'm going to hit this button down here that says "Save as Template", and I'm going to give it this name, "Conversation Starter". I could share it with my team if I want, but the important part is that I hit "Save", and now I have that template saved. And now, I'm going to send this message.

So now, before I finish up, I want to look at a couple other things. First, I'm going to go back into somebody's profile, and I'm going to hit the button to send a message here. When you send a message to one individual person, you'll see another button beneath the template button for connections. If you click on that, you can see connections that you have in common with this person. So, if I find that this person has a colleague in common with me, then that might be good for my conversation starter, or it might be a good opportunity to get a third-party introduction.

But you only see that when you're contacting one person at a time. Now this is also a good opportunity to flip over to the Templates button, and you can see that that conversation starter template that I saved a moment ago is here. So I can click on that when I'm writing a message, and it'll fill in all that text that I saved. But of course I've already sent a message to this person, so I'm not going to send this, I'm going to cancel it. So I'll hit the "X" up here at the top. Finally, I'm going to go back to my project, back to my Graphics Lead project, and now I can see, after a moment, these people are no longer in the New status, they're in the Contacted status.

Of course, I can find them all under the All tab, but if I go to New, they're not there, but now that I've sent them all messages, they've been automatically sorted into the Contact status. And as I get responses from them, some of them will start to sort over to the replied status. Great. So now I've sent my first communcation to some possible candidates using InMail and LinkedIn Recruiter.


Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-linkedin-recruiter/sending-messages-and-saving-message-templates