LinkedIn is the biggest professional networking platform with over 1 billion users in over 200 countries worldwide.

It all started in 2008 when the blue giant released a new staffing solutions product, LinkedIn Recruiter, that offered premium features and services designed to work intuitively to fit individual corporate staffing departments’ needs.

The tool is now a popular choice for talent acquisition specialists and recruiters to find and engage with candidates on the platform.

However, there’s a lot of mystery surrounding its price tag. Here, we’ll delve into the costs of LinkedIn’s recruiter packages, and explore whether it's a worthwhile investment.

What is LinkedIn Recruiter? 

LinkedIn Recruiter is a premium service offered by LinkedIn specifically designed for recruiters. 

It's like a supercharged version of a regular LinkedIn profile that allows recruiters to access a wider pool of talent, find contact information for potential candidates, and manage the recruitment process more effectively.

LinkedIn Recruiter is a separate platform entirely that allows recruiters to search for candidates through a Boolean search – a method of refining your searches online using specific keywords and operators.

You can then send messages to candidates via InMails, private messages that allow you to directly message other LinkedIn members without needing a prior connection.

What are some of its benefits?

LinkedIn Recruiter beats a regular LinkedIn profile in the following ways: 

• Advanced search filters:  Search for candidates based on specific skills, location, education, industry, and more.

• Direct candidate outreach: Send InMails and find out which candidates are free to message. You can also send bulk messages via your dashboard. 

• Pipeline management: Add candidates to a ‘project’ to segment your messaging and get alerts if and when they change jobs or get promoted

What are LinkedIn’s recruitment packages? 

LinkedIn Recruiter comes in two packages: 

Recruiter Lite

This is the more affordable option, catering to individual recruiters or small teams, and has the following features: 

• Network access visibility: Up to 3rd-degree connections

• Search filters: 20+ filters

• Search alerts: 10

• InMail messages: 30

Recruiter Corporate

This is the premium and most powerful solution. 

• Network access visibility: Full access to all profiles

• Search filters: All search filters

• Search alerts: 50

• InMail messages: 150

Recruiter Corporate also offers additional features like collaboration tools, candidate pipeline management, and custom reporting.

LinkedIn Recruiter’s price factors

LinkedIn doesn’t publish the prices of its recruitment products and charges users on a case-by-case basis. The true costs are only revealed by their sales team after they assess your company and needs. Then they’ll give you a custom price based on the following:

• Number of Licenses: The price per seat decreases slightly as you purchase more licenses.

• Company Size and Industry: Larger companies and those in competitive industries may pay more.

• Location: Prices vary by geographical location.

LinkedIn Recruiter costs (as of April 2024)

Based on industry research and reports, here's a ballpark figure for what you can expect to pay:

• Recruiter Lite: $170 per month for a single license, $270/month per license (licenses 2 - 5) 
  
  

• Recruiter Corporate: $12,960 per seat annually (around $1,080 monthly)

Additional costs to LinkedIn Recruiter

InMails

InMails are messages to those outside of your network. Your monthly allowance on Recruiter Corporate is 150, and 30 on Recruiter Lite.

So if you’re new to recruitment or entering a new market, you’ll need more than just your monthly allowance of InMails to engage with potential candidates, especially if the average response rate is between 18-25%.

So, how much are additional InMails? Well, they’re priced at a staggering $10 per piece. Meaning, if you want an additional 100 InMail messages, in which you’ll most likely get 18-25 responses, it’ll cost you $1,000. 

Job posting

If you want to post a job that you’re recruiting for on LinkedIn in hopes of getting some qualified candidates in your pipeline, note that posting a single job is free but the job post won’t rank on the first page and will only appear in limited searches.

Like any job board, if you want to increase the visibility of the job post, you’ll have to promote it by buying promoted posts and setting your budget. The higher the budget the higher your job post will rank.

Another option for job posts is a contract model with the LinkedIn talent solutions department where you set your prerequisites for a role (i.e Machine Learning Engineer, San Francisco, 7+ years of experience), sign up for the job post to run for 6 months and get billed at the end of the period for every qualified candidate who applied. 

Is it worth it?

The answer to this question in any other circumstances would almost always be no. 

However, since LinkedIn’s incorporation in 2003, it has gone on to monopolize the recruitment industry where it now seems impossible to get ahead and beat out the competition without investing in a LinkedIn Recruiter corporate license and a bunch of InMails.

Is there an alternative? 

There are a few alternatives to purchasing an expensive LinkedIn Recruiter license. These are:

Free options

1. Use up your connections: LinkedIn allows you to send 100 connection requests per week. Once someone is connected to you, you can message them for free, so make sure you’re exhausting this option. 

   
   

2. Try an email-finding tool: You can still find candidates through a basic LinkedIn search. It won’t allow you to go over a certain number of pages without buying a premium package, but you can still find a handful of candidates. With these candidates, you can scrape their email addresses via a free trial of an email scraping tool like ContactOut or Lusha.

   
   

3. Create content: You can always post relevant and valuable content on LinkedIn to build up your personal brand and attract potential candidates. You can write blogs, LinkedIn posts, and do webinars about industry trends and insights. 
   
   

Job boards

You can sign up to various job boards such as Indeed, Monster, or Glassdoor and post jobs to attract candidates who are looking for new opportunities. Here's a summary of why you might consider using a job board instead of LinkedIn Recruiter: 

Active job seekers: Job boards attract users specifically looking for new opportunities, whereas some on LinkedIn might not be actively searching. This means you reach a pool likely ready to apply, potentially streamlining your process.

Cost-effectiveness: Compared to LinkedIn Recruiter subscriptions, job boards can be a more budget-friendly option, especially with tiered pricing structures based on your needs.

Increased visibility: Posting on relevant job boards expands your company's reach beyond existing networks, attracting a broader range of talent that you may not have come across on LinkedIn.

However, keep in mind:

Job boards don’t offer the same access to candidate profiles.

You’ll receive thousands of applications from irrelevant candidates and filtering them out will be an extremely time-intensive task.

Plus, data has it that as much as 70% of the workforce is made up of passive candidates who weren’t actively seeking a new job. So, if you only rely on active job seekers, you're cutting your talent pool down to just 30%. 

Juicebox (PeopleGPT)

The best alternative to LinkedIn Recruiter is Juicebox, an AI-powered recruitment search engine that leverages advanced AI and natural language to pinpoint exactly who you’re looking for–all without needing to run a boolean search. 

Here's a quick rundown of its key features:

Advanced database: Juicebox utilizes artificial intelligence to search a massive database of over 800 million profiles from multiple sources around the web in real-time.

Find candidates using natural language: It goes beyond traditional Boolean search and allows you to search for a candidate by prompting into the machine.

For example: Hey Juicebox, find me a Senior Python Engineer in San Francisco with 7+ years of experience. Give me a list of candidates who used to work for Apple, Amazon, or Google. 

And voila, your candidate shortlist is created.

Specificity: You can refine and specify your search to a tee. The platform can filter candidates by job title, location, company affiliation, desired skills, published papers, niche, and more.

Contact information: Gain access to accurate contact information like emails and phone numbers, and reach out to candidates directly. Like having LinkedIn and Lusha in one.

Personalized outreach features: Juicebox has personalized AI email templates designed to increase your responses by personalizing your outreach.

Talent Insights: Access data-driven recruitment that enables you to dive deeper into a specific company to discover its talent strategy.

ATS Integration: Export all of the profiles in your shortlist straight to your ATS or CRM with a simple one-click integration. 

Juicebox (PeopleGPT) is a game-changer in modern recruitment and gives you access to hundreds of millions of profiles, engage with candidates at scale, find new leads, and get data-driven insights for a fraction of the price of LinkedIn Recruiter. 

Try it for free.