You Sent 200 InMails Last Month and Got 10 Responses. Your Competitor Sent 50 and Got 40. Here's What They're Doing Differently.

Let me tell you about the most expensive spreadsheet I’ve ever seen.

A recruiter at a mid-size staffing agency showed me his sourcing tracker last year. He had 200 LinkedIn InMail sends logged for the month. Next to each one, a status column: “No response.” “No response.” “No response.” Scrolling down, the pattern broke occasionally — 10 replies out of 200. A 5% response rate. He’d burned through his entire monthly InMail allocation in three weeks and was asking his manager to buy more credits.

Meanwhile, I was working with another recruiter at a competing agency. She’d sent 50 InMails that same month — and had 22 responses. She wasn’t a better recruiter. She wasn’t luckier. She was running targeted, multi-channel outreach sequences instead of playing the volume game.

The difference between these two approaches isn’t marginal. It’s the difference between a sustainable sourcing operation and an expensive treadmill that burns out recruiters and burns through budgets.

The True Cost of Spray-and-Pray

Here’s a number most agency owners don’t calculate: the real cost per response when you’re doing spray-and-pray sourcing.

LinkedIn InMail credits cost between $1.60 and $10 each depending on your subscription tier and usage. Let’s be generous and say you’re on a Recruiter Lite plan where each InMail works out to about $2.50 per credit. At a 5% response rate on generic batch messages, you’re paying $50 per response in InMail credits alone.

But the credits are the cheap part. The expensive part is the recruiter’s time. Writing and sending 200 InMails — even templated ones — takes time. Finding the profiles, reviewing them, copying names into templates, sending, logging the activity. A recruiter sending 200 InMails per month is spending roughly 25-30 hours on that outreach. At a loaded cost of $55/hour for an experienced recruiter, that’s $1,375-$1,650 in recruiter time. For 10 responses.

That’s $165 per response when you factor in both the credits and the time. And not every response is positive — some are “not interested,” some are “wrong fit.” You might get 5-6 genuinely interested candidates out of those 10 responses. Now you’re looking at $275-$330 per interested candidate.

Why Volume Feels Like Productivity (But Isn’t)

I understand the instinct behind spray-and-pray. When a hiring manager is breathing down your neck for candidates and you have an open req that’s been sitting for two weeks, firing off 50 InMails feels productive. You’re doing something. You can see the activity. You can tell your manager you’ve contacted 50 candidates today.

But activity isn’t output. Output is responses. Output is conversations. Output is submittals. And when your approach generates a 5-10% response rate, you need enormous volume to produce even modest output. It’s a trap — the worse your targeting, the more volume you need, and the more volume you need, the less time you have for proper targeting.

The agencies I work with that break this cycle share one common trait: they stopped measuring sourcing by messages sent and started measuring by conversations started. That single metric shift changes everything about how recruiters approach outreach.

The Multi-Channel Sequence That Actually Works

The highest-performing outreach pattern I’ve built for recruitment agencies follows a specific rhythm across three channels. Here’s what it looks like for a typical permanent placement search:

Day 1 — LinkedIn InMail. Short, personal, specific. Not “I have an exciting opportunity.” Instead: the company context, why their background caught your eye, and one compelling detail about the role. Under 100 words. The goal isn’t to sell the role — it’s to start a conversation.

Day 3 — Email. A different angle. If the InMail focused on the role, the email focuses on the candidate’s career trajectory. “I noticed you moved from [Company A] to [Company B] two years ago — this role represents a similar step-up in scope.” Attach a brief role summary if you have one. Email lets you include more detail without the character constraints of InMail.

Day 7 — LinkedIn connection request. A short note referencing your InMail. “Hi [Name], I sent you a message earlier this week about the [role] at [company]. Happy to connect regardless — I cover [specialisation] roles in [location] and share relevant opportunities regularly.” This builds your network even if they’re not interested now.

Day 10 — Email follow-up. Brief and low-pressure. “Just checking if you had a chance to see my note about [role]. No worries if the timing isn’t right — happy to keep you in mind for future opportunities that match your background.” Add one new piece of information: a salary indicator, a recent company achievement, or a team detail.

Day 14 — SMS (for roles above $100k or urgent fills). “Hi [Name], Rachel from [agency]. Sent you a note about a [title] role at [company] — $[salary range]. Worth a quick chat? Happy to call whenever suits.” SMS has the highest open rate of any channel — over 95% — and for senior candidates, a text feels more personal than another email.

Day 21 — Final email. A graceful close. “I’ll assume the timing isn’t right on this one. I’ll keep your profile on file for [specialisation] roles — feel free to reach out anytime if your situation changes.” This message protects the long-term relationship even when the short-term answer is no.

Building the Machine: From Manual to Automated

Here’s where automation transforms this from a nice idea into a scalable system. A recruiter can manually run a multi-channel sequence for maybe 15-20 candidates before the tracking becomes unmanageable. They forget who got which message, miss follow-ups, accidentally double-message candidates, or let the sequence die after touch two because a new urgent req came in.

Automation handles the sequencing, timing, and tracking — the recruiter handles the targeting and personalisation that actually drive response rates.

The system works like this: the recruiter builds a shortlist in LinkedIn Recruiter or their ATS, enriches the contact data (email and phone where available), and writes the sequence messaging tailored to the role. Then automation takes over — it sends each touch at the right time on the right channel, tracks opens and clicks, pauses the sequence the moment a candidate replies, and alerts the recruiter for the human conversation.

The recruiter’s time shifts from sending messages (low value) to selecting candidates and crafting messaging (high value). Instead of spending 30 hours per month sending 200 generic InMails, they spend 10 hours building targeted shortlists and writing compelling sequences — and get three to four times the responses.

The Agency That Stopped Playing the Numbers Game

A tech recruitment agency I worked with was running a classic spray-and-pray operation. Three recruiters, each sending 150-200 InMails per week across their open roles. Their LinkedIn Recruiter subscription was costing $48,000 annually for the team, and their response rates had been declining steadily — down to 7% from 12% two years earlier. LinkedIn’s algorithm wasn’t rewarding their bulk approach.

We rebuilt their sourcing workflow from the ground up. Instead of 200 InMails per role, each recruiter built shortlists of 40-50 highly targeted candidates. We set up multi-channel sequences: LinkedIn InMail, personalised email (sourced through their Bullhorn records and enrichment tools), and SMS for senior roles.

The results after 90 days: their total InMail volume dropped by 65%. Their response rate jumped from 7% to 31%. They were starting more conversations with fewer messages. Their InMail acceptance rate improved so much that LinkedIn’s algorithm started showing their messages more prominently — a compounding benefit that further increased response rates.

The financial impact was immediate. They downgraded one of their LinkedIn Recruiter seats to Recruiter Lite (saving $6,000 annually) because the reduced volume didn’t require the full allocation. More importantly, each recruiter reclaimed roughly 12 hours per week that had been spent on low-return outreach. Those hours went into client development and candidate interviews — activities that directly generate revenue.

Over 12 months, the agency attributed 14 additional placements to the improved sourcing approach — candidates who responded to targeted sequences and wouldn’t have responded to generic batch InMails. At their average fee of $18,500 for tech placements, that’s $259,000 in additional revenue. Against a setup cost of two days and ongoing automation costs that were a fraction of what they’d been spending on surplus LinkedIn credits.

The InMail Economy Nobody Talks About

Here’s something LinkedIn doesn’t advertise: InMail credits are a depreciating asset. LinkedIn’s algorithm penalises accounts with low response rates by reducing InMail visibility. If you’re consistently sending messages that get ignored, your future messages are more likely to end up in the “Other” tab rather than the main inbox. Spray-and-pray doesn’t just waste credits today — it makes tomorrow’s credits less effective.

Conversely, accounts with high response rates get algorithmic preference. Their InMails land in the primary inbox more often, they get credited back InMails for accepted messages, and their profile appears higher in recruiter search results.

This means there’s a compound effect to targeted outreach that goes beyond the immediate response rate improvement. Over three to six months, a recruiter who shifts from spray-and-pray to targeted sequences will see their baseline response rate climb even on identical messaging — because the algorithm is now working with them instead of against them.

I’ve seen this effect add 5-8 percentage points to response rates over a six-month period. On top of the 2-3x improvement from better targeting and multi-channel sequences, you’re looking at a total response rate that’s four to five times what spray-and-pray delivers.

The Mindset Shift

The hardest part of moving from spray-and-pray to targeted outreach isn’t the technology — it’s the psychology. Volume feels safe. Sending 200 messages feels like you’ve done everything you can. If nobody responds, the market is tight, candidates are passive, the role is hard to fill. It’s never the approach.

Targeted outreach requires a different kind of confidence. You’re sending 50 messages instead of 200, and that feels risky. What if the 50 are wrong? What if you need volume? What if your manager asks why your outreach numbers are down?

The answer is always the same: show them the response numbers. Fifty messages with a 30% response rate produces 15 conversations. Two hundred messages with a 7% response rate produces 14 conversations. Except the 50-message approach cost a quarter of the time and credits, and the candidates who responded are better qualified because they were better targeted in the first place.

The recruiters who make this shift never go back. They can’t. Once you’ve experienced the difference between chasing 200 strangers and having genuine conversations with 15 well-matched candidates, the old way feels absurd. Like cold-calling from the phone book when you could be working referrals.

Stop measuring your sourcing in messages sent. Start measuring it in conversations started. Automate the sequencing, the follow-up, and the tracking — and spend your time on the two things that actually matter: picking the right candidates and writing messages worth responding to.