LinkedIn direct messaging is limited to messages to 1st degree connections, with the exception of some 'open' profiles.

If you want to send direct messages to 2nd and 3rd level connections, it costs you money. If you’re a paying user, with for a LinkedIn Recruiter seat for example, the subscription costs you around $11.000 per year to send just 150 InMails per month.

Luckily, there are many ways to contact candidates without a paid LinkedIn account. Some of the ways are finding candidate contact details, send LinkedIn connection invites or use a sourcing platform that finds profiles including contact details.

But in this blog we will focus on how to send unlimited and free messages to candidates using group messaging within LinkedIn.

LinkedIn group messages

LinkedIn groups are groups that serve as online communities. The members within the group connect on a certain topic.

Some examples of LinkedIn groups are the ‘Venture Capital Cafe’ group and the ‘JavaScript Full Stack Developer’ group.

Within these groups, thousands of members are connecting and sharing content.

If you are part of the group, you can send direct messages to the other members for free and without many limitations.

This is how to send messages to LinkedIn group members:

1.Find a group that represents your target candidate

Go to the LinkedIn search bar and select Groups. 

Then insert the keywords that describe your candidate.

Select the group(s) that best describe your target group.

2.Request to join the group

You have to be part of the group to send messages to group messages. 

You can hit the button ‘Request to join’. 

The group admin gets a notification with your request and can decide to give you access to the group or decline your request. 

Once the admin has accepted your request you get a notification saying you’re now part of the group and you can access its content and members.

‍

3.Find the right people to send messages to

In the LinkedIn groups, you can only find people based on their names. So just using LinkedIn, it's not possible to filter the group members based on for example job title or headline.

You could go through the group members individually and manually send them a message. But that takes time and you have to take into account that when you go through the group members manually, the members page is not paginated so you have to keep track of where you left off.

An alternative of filtering the group members is using a scraper like Phantombuster or a tool like Linked Helper 2 to get the group members and their profile information so you can filter them based on your requirements.

4. Send them a message

When you have right selection of candidates, the last step is to simply send the selected candidates a message.

This works very similar to sending any other direct message on LinkedIn.