Finding a recruiter to apply through jobs which the recruiter is contracted or employed to hire for is very different than sending unsolicited spams to employees at a target company, even if both can happen on LinkedIn. It was the former suggestion that was being given.

Ah I thought they meant a recruiter at the company and not an intermediary. Thanks.

Either way, really - many in-house recruiters do actively source via LinkedIn and encourage inbound messages there from interested candidates. But it seemed like this was a suggestion to use LinkedIn as a front door rather than as a back door.

The bigger the employer, the more likely it is, that after a first recruiter phone screen, you still havebto go through the normal recruotment / application process, for compliance reasons mostly. No big deal, as the recruiter is working on your behalf on the other end, if he decided to invite you to an interview with the hiring manager, to fast track you application through whatever arcane or byzantine process there is.

Yeah. The recruiter doesn’t bypass the process, except maybe the first stage. They just get you into it with enough attention to get at least a first conversation, and usually a polite way to nudge the company for a response if they get slow for whatever reason. Still sometimes helpful.

Honestly, an internal employee referral helps in similar ways, especially from an employee who knows you well in a professional context. But that isn’t always available.

Sure it works for you but if you need tools to manage then I can't imagine the average applicant in your process has very good odds.

Even if only a few companies hire through direct contact, many of the ones that do will hire more than 1 in 10 of the relatively infrequent direct contacts, while their HR process may be sitting on the thousands of regular applications.

By tools, you mean a gmail label, yes?

Sure, anything that acts as an external structure to not even know the very basics is not a good sign for their odds..

People should write you a cover letter on the off chance that you open a spam folder of such volume that you can't bother to manually label a mail as belonging in it?

If they're doing both, I'd reconsider that policy. A lot of people will submit a normal application and additionally reach out through LinkedIn, since for many companies their direct application process might as well be a garbage bin even for qualified candidates.

If it's solely through LinkedIn fair enough I guess.

As someone on the other side of this - applications sink to the bottom and often never receive a response when sent to places like jobs@, so LinkedIn is a way to at least get the attention of a real person.

I’d suggest calling out on your job posting that LinkedIn messages may be missed and the email is the correct place to reach out.