LinkedIn Recruiter pricing is hard to find online.

So we wrote this blog to inform you on the available plans, differences in plans and the latest pricing indications.

We'll answer these questions for you:

• Which LinkedIn Recruiter plans are there?
• What does LinkedIn Recruiter cost?
• When should I pay for LinkedIn Recruiter?
• What are my alternatives?

Which LinkedIn Recruiter plans are there?

For recruiters there are basically two plans: ‘LinkedIn Recruiter’ and ‘LinkedIn Recruiter Lite’. LinkedIn Recruiter has two flavours, ‘Corporate’ and ‘Professional Services’.

Other LinkedIn plans like ‘LinkedIn Sales Navigator’ and 'LinkedIn Premium Business’ are not necessarily made for recruiting, but can do the job for a sourcer or recruiter depending on how they work. 

In this blog we'll focus on the available plans and pricing for LinkedIn Recruiter (corporate and professional services) and LinkedIn Recruiter Lite.

The main difference between LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Recruiter Lite are the amount of search filters you can use, the monthly amount of InMails (30 InMails vs 150 InMails) and that LinkedIn Recruiter (both corporate and professional services) are shared accounts, and LinkedIn Recruiter Lite is not.

What does LinkedIn Recruiter cost?

Try to google LinkedIn pricing and chances are very small you find a reliable answer to your question.

LinkedIn intentionally keeps pricing vague because they have market and account based pricing strategies in place.

We can however give an indication of prices for 2024 based on the latest offered prices and validation with our recruiter network.

Take into account that prices can vary per geography, company and industry.

These are some of the latest LinkedIn pricing indications (averages, rounded off):

• Recruiter Corporate: $10.800 per seat billed annually
• Recruiter Lite: $1.680 for a single license and $2.670 per year per license (licenses 2 - 5) per seat billed annually (or $170 per month for a single user or $270 per month for multiple users)
• Business premium (not a Recruiter license): $576 billed annually (or $60 per month)

Main differences LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Recruiter Lite

The main differences between the plans are the amount of search filters, the monthly amount of InMails and the option to share accounts and data.

LinkedIn Recruiter (corporate and professional services)

• Finds all public LinkedIn profiles
• ‍InMails: 150 InMails every month
• Search: 40 search filters‍
• Collaboration: Multi user account is available (collaborative environment)
• Reports: Jobs and InMail reporting, plus insights into your Recruiter pipeline, usage, and performance summaries

LinkedIn Recruiter Lite

• Finds only 1st, 2nd and 3rd connections, doesn't find people outside of your network!
• ‍InMails: 30 InMails every month
• ‍Search: 20 search filters‍
• Collaboration: multi user account not available‍
• Reports: not included

When should I pay for LinkedIn Recruiter?

Many recruiters and companies say that they pay for LinkedIn Recruiter because “LinkedIn has the most people on there”. 

With about 800 million user profiles, LinkedIn is indeed the biggest professional network in the world.

But what most people don’t know is that you don’t need a paid LinkedIn account to access the profiles on there.

What are my alternatives?

If you don't want to pay the indicated fees for LinkedIn Recruiter, there are plenty of alternatives.

Many engines provide the same data (profiles) as LinkedIn does itself.

These are your alternatives to recruiting on LinkedIn without paying the LinkedIn Recruiter fee:

1. Use a talent search engine that finds LinkedIn profiles

There are search engines specifically made for finding the right LinkedIn profiles.

Most of the time, these search engines also provide profiles from other platforms where candidates can be found.

An example is HeroHunt.ai which finds 1 billion profiles worldwide across LinkedIn, GitHub and Stack Overflow and lets you reach out automatically with personalized messages.

2. Use the free version of LinkedIn

You can search LinkedIn using your free account. It helps to know how to build the right search strings. Two things to know at least when you want to get the most out of searching LinkedIn with a free account are:

• How to x-ray LinkedIn (full x-ray guide)
• How to use search operators (full Boolean search guide)