LinkedIn Recruiter vs. Recruiter Lite: How Do They Compare?

LinkedIn is the number one social media platform for professionals who are looking for a new job, building their business, or just trying to network with people in their industry.

In 2008, LinkedIn launched its hiring solution Recruiter, making it possible for companies to find their next hire right on the LinkedIn platform. Today, the product is available as Recruiter Lite and Recruiter (Professional Services and Corporate). Here’s how they compare.

LinkedIn Recruiter vs. Recruiter Lite: Breakdown of key features

Before we dissect the various LinkedIn Recruiter features, we should note that the main difference between the three versions is that LinkedIn designed them with different users in mind.

LinkedIn describes Recruiter Lite as ideal for small-to-medium-sized organizations. Recruiter Professional Services is geared toward recruitment agencies, while Recruiter Corporate is designed for big organizations with greater hiring needs.

LinkedIn Recruiter pricing

LinkedIn has only published the pricing of Recruiter Lite, which at the time of publication stands at $170 per month or $1,680 per year. To get the price of Recruiter (both Professional Services and Corporate), you need to contact the sales team. 

Although some reports put LinkedIn pricing for Recruiter Corporate at $10,800 per year ($1,080 per month), the pricing will also vary according to your location and currency, so it’s best to get a direct quote.

Network access

Network access controls communication between accounts and the information you see on a person’s profile. For example, a 1st-degree connection allows you to send a direct message to someone in your network, but you can only message a 3rd-degree connection with an InMail.

With Recruiter Lite, you can contact your 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-degree connections, but you’re unable to contact anyone who is out of your network. Recruiter Professional Services allows you to unlock 30 profiles per month, while Recruiter Corporate gives you unlimited profile access.

Filters

With over 930 million users on LinkedIn, the ability to filter profiles according to your role requirements is crucial. Recruiter Lite and Recruiter both include several filtering capabilities to help you narrow down your search:

Search filters

• Recruiter Lite: Over 20 filters
• Recruiter Professional Services and Recruiter Corporate: Over 40 filters

Open to contract work filter

• Recruiter Lite: No
• Recruiter Professional Services and Recruiter Corporate: Yes

Skill assessment filter

• Recruiter Lite: No
• Recruiter Professional Services and Recruiter Corporate: Yes

Ability to add tags to candidate profiles

• Recruiter Lite: No
• Recruiter Professional Services and Recruiter Corporate: Yes

Both Recruiter and Recruiter Lite also allow you to use Boolean modifiers to filter potential candidates.

Spotlight ads

Spotlight ads allow you to customize ad content with a member’s own profile photo, first name, or job title. The landing page isn’t limited to LinkedIn, which allows you to link to your careers page or another section of your website. You can also adjust the call-to-action button and featured logo. 

LinkedIn Recruiter users (Professional Services and Corporate) can access Spotlight ads, while Lite users cannot.

Insights

LinkedIn enables talent teams to access different search and candidate insights to support their recruiting strategy. These insights are only available if you’re using Recruiter Professional Services or Recruiter Corporate – not Recruiter Lite.

Search insights provide a visual overview of the available talent and help you gain a better understanding of the market. You can also share these insights with the rest of your team. With candidate insights, you can see whether a person is open to changing their job, if they held several roles at their company, and other essential information.

InMail

InMail messages allow you to get in touch with job seekers even if they aren’t a first-degree connection. The messages are limited to 1,900 characters, and the subject line has a 200-character limit. Each version of Recruiter has a different limit on the number of InMails you can send per month:

• Recruiter Lite: 30 InMails
• Recruiter Professional Services: 100 InMails
• Recruiter Corporate: 150 InMails

Users of Recruiter Professional Services and Corporate can also pool their InMails. For example, if you have five seats on your Recruiter Corporate account, you have a total of 750 InMail credits at your disposal. You can also set recruiter usage limits for every seat to ensure recruiters don’t use more credits than they need.

Bulk messaging is another InMail feature that isn’t available to Recruiter Lite users. Recruiter (Professional Services and Corporate) allows you to send a maximum of 25 messages at a time.

Collaboration with other team members

If you opt for a premium LinkedIn Recruiter account (Professional Services or Corporate), you will also have access to features that simplify collaboration among team members.

If a recruiter wants the hiring manager to take a look at a candidate’s profile, they can share it without leaving the platform. It’s also possible to tag teammates in notes to keep all communication in one place. The platform will also save previous recruiting activities and candidate applications so everyone has access to the same data.

Integrations

Depending on how many tools you have in your recruiting tech stack, integrations are critical to sync your workflows and prevent data silos. 

Integrations are unavailable with a Recruiter Lite account, but if you are a Recruiter Professional Services or Corporate user, you have a couple of integrations at your disposal:

• 28+ applicant tracking systems (ATS)
• LinkedIn Talent Insights
• LinkedIn Talent Hub
• LinkedIn recruitment marketing solutions

What are the alternatives to LinkedIn Recruiter?

The rising prices of LinkedIn’s recruiting products, coupled with the arrival of more advanced recruiting technology, AI, and automation tools are driving many talent teams to find other solutions to support their hiring needs.

Thankfully, there are many alternatives to LinkedIn Recruiter. Some of these alternatives offer more robust functionalities powered by talent data that help you surface the best candidates faster, consolidate your recruiting tech stack, improve diversity, and implement an efficient hiring process.

For example, Findem’s platform for talent acquisition and management allows you to spend less time combing through LinkedIn profiles, thanks to our unique data. Our platform analyzes millions of candidate data points to generate new data we call attributes, which are candidate qualities you can’t find in a resume or LinkedIn profile, such as “past founder,” “international experience,” and “pre-IPO experience.”

With attribute-based search, you can identify the right internal and external candidates much faster than with traditional methods, such as LinkedIn. One of our clients, Adobe, sourced 100 qualified candidates in all of 10 minutes and made 11 hires in less than 90 days using our platform.

‍Request a demo to learn more about how Findem’s unique talent data can empower your hiring team.