As the name suggests, LinkedIn Recruiter Lite is a plain (or limited) version of the LinkedIn Recruiter product.

LinkedIn Recruiter exists to let recruiters find and reach candidates directly on the LinkedIn platform.

LinkedIn Recruiter Lite does exactly that, but with some limitations and therefore at a lower price.

In this guide you will learn the following:

1. Is LinkedIn Recruiter Lite the right product for you
2. How to work with LinkedIn Recruiter Lite
3. Which alternatives to LinkedIn Recruiter Lite there are

1. Is LinkedIn Recruiter Lite the right product for you

Since LinkedIn Recruiter is expensive and not everyone can afford the $850+ per month per user, LinkedIn Recruiter Lite was put in the market as a more affordable solution.

That affordability comes with some strong limitations that you have to be aware of before considering paying for it.

The most important limitation is that the Lite version will only let you find people who are within your network.

That means that LinkedIn Recruiter Lite subscription only lets you find:

• 1st degree connections: people who you're directly connected with
• 2nd degree connections: people who are connected with your own 1st connections
• 3rd degree connections: people who are connected with your own 2nd connections

All other profiles on LinkedIn are invisible when you're using LinkedIn Recruiter Lite.

Other things to consider in regards to limits:

• ‍InMails: maximum of 30 InMails every month (as opposed to 150 with LinkedIn Recruiter)
• ‍Search: 20 search filters (as opposed to 40 search filters available in LinkedIn Recruiter)
• Collaboration: multi user account is not available‍ 
• Reports: not available

2. How to work with LinkedIn Recruiter Lite

Once you’re aware of who you can find and who you can’t find in LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, you can decide on if you want to give the product a try.

If you’re eligible, you can get a 30 day trial for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite.

See here more information on the LinkedIn Recruiter Lite free trial.

Once you started your free trial (or already have an account) these are the steps to recruit talent:

1. Create your search
2. Screen candidates
3. Reach out

1. Create your search

To start finding people you need to manually build your search. 

These are the most important things to include in your search and how they impact your search:

Skills and keywords

Skills are searched for in the entire LinkedIn profile.

When you include ‘Data’ as a skill, the candidates who appear in your results are likely to have the word ‘Data’ somewhere on their profile.

However, this is not always the case. Even though it seems that LinkedIn lets you look for profiles with that keyword only, in many cases profiles are found in the search results which do not contain all the keywords included in the search.

Also important to realize here is that minor changes in how you spell keywords can change your results entirely.

Here’s a full guide on using keywords in LinkedIn Recruiter (Lite).

Job title

The job title filter searches in the current and previous job title section of LinkedIn profiles.

Using a job title for some roles can be a very helpful way of finding the right people, but it can also seriously limit your search results. You can test this by comparing results of a search that includes only back-end related keywords and no job title with a search that has the same keywords but also the job title Back-end engineer included. You see the results change significantly.

Here’s what to take into account when it comes to job title synonyms and search strings.

Location

The location filter can be added to look for talent based in certain locations. The location filter searches in the main location field (for example Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and in the location of the current job of the candidate.

If you want to further narrow down your search, you can include filters like education and companies. Remember that LinkedIn Recruiter Lite limits the available filters to 20.

‍