What Happened When We Made Mass Mail Free

The meter

Every recruiter who has used a job board's resume database knows the meter. It has different names: InMail credits, contact credits, resume views, monthly contact allowances, per-seat licences with a sending cap. The shape is always the same. You pay to search, then you pay again, per person, to say hello.

The meter changes how recruiters work before a single email goes out. A shortlist gets trimmed to fit the remaining credits, not the requirement. A borderline candidate is skipped because the credit might be better spent. Follow-ups are rationed. Outreach becomes a budget line, and every conversation starts with an accounting question: is this person worth a credit?

The strange part is who is paying whom. The candidate joined the job board in order to be contacted. The recruiter joined in order to contact them. The board sits between the two and charges for the introduction, per introduction.

Per-send pricing is not cost recovery. An email costs almost nothing to deliver. It is a revenue model, and it works against the one action that creates a placement.

The decision

When we built outreach into the iitjobs employer portal, we had the same three options every board has. Meter it. Cap it. Leave it open.

We left it open. Every employer account could send as much mail as it wanted, to any audience it could define, at no cost. Not as a launch promotion, and not as a free tier with an upgrade behind it. As the rule.

The reasoning was simple and a little uncomfortable. iitjobs is a marketplace. We make money when matches happen: when a job gets filled, a recruiter stays, a candidate comes back. Every email a recruiter does not send because of a meter is a match that did not get the chance to happen. Charging per send would have meant charging for the exact behaviour we wanted more of.

We also knew what we were afraid of. Spam. Candidates drowning in irrelevant mail and leaving. Our sending reputation, and therefore every recruiter's deliverability, damaged by a few bad actors. Those fears were reasonable, and some of them came true. We decided the answer to them would be review, not a price.

What actually happened

The volume came. More than 1.4 million emails have gone out through the channel, to more than 300,000 individual candidates. This year alone, outreach has reached over 160,000 distinct people. The audience it draws on is the full iitjobs talent pool of 590K+ IT profiles.

The mail itself looks like a staffing floor. Read the subject lines and you see a senior Python developer, an SAP FICO consultant working remote, desktop support in Hartford on a hybrid schedule, a hotlist of consultants available this week, an invitation to interview. This is not marketing mail. It is recruiters doing the job, at the pace the job requires, without stopping to count.

And yes, the abuse came too. A small number of accounts treated "unlimited" as a target rather than a permission: the same candidates contacted again and again, requirements blasted to people who did not fit them, subject lines written for clicks. Left alone, that behaviour would have cost every honest recruiter on the platform their inbox placement. It was exactly what the meter is supposed to prevent, and it was the moment the decision had to earn its keep.

The rule we added: every send is reviewed

At the start of 2024 we put a review step in front of the channel. It has run on every campaign since.

Here is how it works. Every send creates a moderation record: the subject, the body, the audience, the sender. A new sender's first campaigns wait for a person on our team to read them. Senders whose campaigns pass review earn a trusted status, and their mail goes out immediately. Trust is not permanent. It can be revoked, and when it is, the account goes back to waiting for a human.

The numbers say the step is doing real work. Roughly one campaign in twenty is declined and never reaches a candidate. Three out of four campaigns go out on earned trust without waiting at all. The recruiters who do the job well are not slowed down. The ones who do not are.

Unlimited and reviewed is a very different thing from unlimited and unwatched. The meter punishes good recruiters and barely slows bad ones. Review does the opposite.

What free changes about the work

When sending costs nothing, the audience is defined by the search, not by the budget. A recruiter builds it the way they would build any search on iitjobs: all of these words, any of these words, an exact phrase, a title, a country. The result set is the mailing list. Run another search, send again. Nobody is counting.

The send button also stopped being a separate product. The same outreach layer sits under Search Talent results, under a firm's private resume bank in the internal ATS, and under bench sales, where consultants get marketed to vendors. Most campaigns start from a search result, but the recruiter never leaves the platform to send, and every send lands on the candidate's record where the whole team can see it.

Practically, that means:

• The shortlist is as long as the requirement needs, never as long as the credits allow.
• Follow-ups are free, so they happen.
• A campaign can be scheduled, sent to a BCC list, or reused from a saved template.
• Outreach history stays with the company account, not in a recruiter's personal mail.

The comparison

What we learned

Why iitjobs

Job boards sell access to people and then meter the conversation. iitjobs gives every employer account the same talent pool, the same search, and an outreach channel with no meter on it, reviewed so it stays worth using. It is the difference between renting a candidate database and being part of a marketplace.