Can no longer email group members on LinkedIn

I don't come on here and make posts or comments much, but I was really irritated by this. Has anyone else noticed that you can no longer email group members on LinkedIn? I noticed it last week and contacted Customer Service thinking it was a bug. They responded to me saying that their research has shown that it's being abused, so they are now incrementallty rolling out the change to the entire LinkedIn community. It's really disappointing that they're taking away a feature I use everyday. I am a Premier paid subscriber of LinkedIn, and I'm assuming the majority of their paid subscribers are recruiters, so unfortunately we will all be adversely affected.

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Al Merrill on March 16, 2011 at 2:28pm

It seems most of the recruiters are running around looking for someone wanting a job, instead of going out to recruit someone off their desk, from their current job. If you're doing that you don't run into a lot of the issues brought up as recruiting problems to be dealt with.

Erik Davids said:

I'll agree with that in regards to the groups. The problem started when recruiters were posting jobs in their discussion page. That's when they added the jobs tab but if you go to any of them they are just littered with jobs.

Al Merrill said:
Hi Erik-

I appreciate your thoughts- we all run our businesses differently and have different requirements. LinkedIn never was a requirement for me to be successful, but the the comments and a special few people who wrote them made for interesting reading, and some had good ideas.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Shannon Drawbaugh on March 16, 2011 at 3:52pm

I agree with you that these people are most definitely getting a million emails from recruiters, and in a way, I do feel bad for them....what a pain in the butt. I just wish that all the recruiters out there would act like a professional. There should definitely be some pre-requisites when you contact someone from LinkedIn. For me personally, I won't contact someone unless I've got a specific position open that matches their profile. I always provide a very detailed job description, and I always provide ALL my contact information. If every recruiter was working this way, I don't think people would be as irritated.

Erik Davids said:

I'm shocked it took so long for them to do this. I am a recruiter obviously but the spam that I've seen and the harrassment by recruiters to some of these folks is out of control. I've been a member of 50 groups for as long as I can remember and started posting jobs to groups when the tab was first added. Now look at the mess in these people's groups.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Craig Silverman on March 16, 2011 at 6:03pm

Groups are not the heart of the functionality and I feel I'm still getting my $250/yr worth of value.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Matt on March 17, 2011 at 11:54pm

Makes for the case of LinkedIn users adding their contact information in contact settings at bottom of their profiles. Hopefully they'll add information like this:

For networking purposes Firstname Lastname can be reached at firstname_lastname@internetserviceprovider.com

Adding the full name here also addresses the issue of LinkedIn suppressing 3rd degree connections last names.

Matt Kerr - Grant Alexander