Liptak, chief of Global Talent Acquisition at NetBrain Technologies Inc., hires niche technology situations in high demand. He has been depended on LinkedIn Recruiter to search probable employees for the networking automation software company but told that tool alone is not enough for doing recruitment.

According to Liptak, many recruiters are pursuing the same candidates, and a lot of LinkedIn InMail messages are now ignored.

"A lot of technology professionals were not paying attention to responses on LinkedIn," Liptak said. He says the response rates from LinkedIn users have been decreasing.

LinkedIn said that the platform is more efficient today than in the past -- in spite of the hiring stipulates created by low unemployment. Additionally, LinkedIn said response rates to InMail messages are rising, and it is due to some technical changes it has made.

Jared Goralnick, the product lead for LinkedIn Recruiter, said enhancements in its matching and the platform has been more effective because of the recommendation engines.

Goralnick clarified that LinkedIn Recruiter used to concentrate on matching search results to people in the database. It now formulates it more of a common match – both who is qualified and who is interested, he said.

LinkedIn's tech attempts to comprehend its users, for example, what networks they are associated with, and what they read. Developments to InMail were designed to make it easier for people to deal with and respond to messages, Goralnick said.

LinkedIn also recognizes people who may have particular skills that might not be mentioned on their profiles but can be inferred from their experience. This sort of information helps to form the order in which candidates come again to recruiters.

LinkedIn won't publish explicit information about response rates, but Goralnick said people are probable to get a response using InMail than email. A response can be a follow up or a "not interested" message. "The response rates have more than doubled" over a period of two-years, he said.

Recruiting challenges bring alternative

However, LinkedIn Recruiter tool enhancements did not work for Liptak.

Earlier this year, Liptak began searching for recruiting tools that could help find candidates. They weren't preparing to change LinkedIn, which he says stays critical to their recruiting endeavours. However, he wanted to advance their odds of filling tech roles, he said.

After exploring five recruiting platforms, Liptak picked to Engage Talent in March. One of the things the Talent market intelligence platform does is identifying changes at firms that hire people with the skills NetBrain needs. Firms experiencing acquisitions, layoffs or financial challenges can motivate employees to look for new opportunities, he said. It furthermore helps recognize other ways, outside of LinkedIn's InMail, to contact candidates.

A few of the Engage data is scratched from the internet and wasn't in every case clean data, rather it offers more than what is available from LinkedIn alone, Liptak said.

"It showed not only the LinkedIn profiles of that candidate, but other social media portals that that candidate was a part of," he said.

"We had various means of getting a hold of that candidate at our disposal, and that's one thing that was attractive to us," Liptak said.

The Engage tool is assisting with hiring. Of the 134 hires NetBrain did this year, Liptak said they would not have known about 30% of those candidates if not for the platform.

The stiff labour market is the main problem

The overarching issue said Trevor White, an analyst at Nucleus Research, is a tight labor market.

"You're competing for people who are just getting spammed at this point because there aren't enough workers to fill jobs that need to be filled," White said.

Linda Brenner, the managing director and founder of Talent Growth Advisors, an Atlanta-based consultancy, recommended a different view of how to do well in recruiting.

In this labor market, Brenner said the solution isn't email vs. InMail or other tech-driven automated talent recognition tool. People with insufficient skills have many options, she said.

Brenner directs building a "bona fide relationship with prospects with information and tactics that are of interest to and compelling to them." This takes a deal of time.

She suggests researching who potential employees are, whether critical care nurses or developers and making a nine- to 12-month arrangement to reach them.

"Perhaps it's first an invite to a lunch lecture or a cocktail hour or a continuing ed program -- nothing about an open job -- all about building a relationship," she said.

The objective isn't to make a hard sell, said Brenner. Following a person's inspirations and interest, and keeping in contact, can be possible through a CRM platform, she said.

This can be done for only the most critical roles -- and those with the scarcest talent available -- because it requires so much investment," Brenner said.