LinkedIn is the biggest professional networking platform in the world. 

With almost 800 million profiles, it is a valuable source of candidates and their professional related information.

But there are also things to take into account while recruiting on LinkedIn, like the high competitiveness amongst recruiters and outdated data.

In this guide you’ll learn about what LinkedIn recruiting is, how you can get started, what to keep in mind and how you can set up a longer term strategy for recruiting on LinkedIn.

What LinkedIn recruiting is about

LinkedIn is the biggest professional social networking platform in the world, owned by Microsoft, which bought LinkedIn in 2016 for a staggering 26.2 billion dollars. 

LinkedIn doesn’t report the exact amount of revenue per product, but estimates are that about two third of the revenue is coming from LinkedIn Talent Solutions.

LinkedIn Talent Solutions have several underlying products, like LinkedIn Recruiter (access to search filters), LinkedIn Jobs (job board) and LinkedIn Recruitment Marketing (job advertisements).

These are recruiting products that LinkedIn offers and what they give you:

1. LinkedIn Recruiter: finding people

The LinkedIn Recruiter seat is one of the premium accounts of LinkedIn. As a company you pay per individual user that uses access to LinkedIn Recruiter.

For small and medium businesses there is the LinkedIn Recruiter Lite plan that is less costly than the full LinkedIn Recruiter functionality.

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

• Recruiter Lite: €1.320 billed annually (or €160 per month)
• Recruiter Corporate: €8.400 billed annually (or €835 per month)

Here’s a full blog on how pricing works for LinkedIn Recruiter.

What you pay for is access to search filters and unlimited search on the platform.

Below is what's included in the plans.

LinkedIn Recruiter (corporate and professional services):

• ‍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:

• ‍InMails: 30 InMails every month
• ‍Search: 20 search filters‍
• Collaboration: multi user account not available‍
• Reports: not included

2. LinkedIn Jobs: posting jobs

You can post jobs that you have on the LinkedIn job board. Posting a job works the same as on any other job board.

You get one job post for free, after that you pay a daily budget for your job post that you can set yourself, for example if you set a daily budget of $10,- that will cost you $300,- for a 30-day listing.

Paid job posts get placed on top of the search results of candidates and therefore can expect some more views and potentially more applicants.

3. LinkedIn Recruitment Marketing: advertising jobs and employer brand

You can pay for promoting your job post or your employer brand as an advertisement to LinkedIn users.

This works the same as the LinkedIn ads that you see yourself on your LinkedIn timeline and in banners for instance.

Prices of advertisements are dependent on the amount of views and how popular your advertisement target group is.

If you target the most sought after software developers, you are likely to pay more than when you are targeting less in demand positions.

How to start recruiting on LinkedIn

If you’re just starting out with recruiting on LinkedIn, you might want to know a couple of things to get started.

LinkedIn as a platform is a valuable source of candidates, but it can be also quite expensive and very competitive.

You’re not the only recruiter on there which can make winning candidates for you hard, so it helps to know your way around on the platform.

First thing to understand: how searches on LinkedIn work

We all know you can find people on LinkedIn using the search bar and filters. But how LinkedIn provides the matching results of your search, is dependent on how you use LinkedIn and what service you are using.

There’s a difference in the user interface between a regular LinkedIn account and the LinkedIn Recruiter account.

The LinkedIn Recruiter functionality allows for some additional search filters, but if you would use the same search criteria the resulting matches will be similar to the regular LinkedIn search.

Searches on as well the regular LinkedIn account as on LinkedIn Recruiter work partly with search filters and partly with (Boolean) search operators.

The use of search filters speak for itself with mostly a selection of options you can include in your search to target it towards for example a specific location, education or language.

Search operators can be used in the general search bar which allow you to determine what to include in your search and what not.

If you would insert the following search string in the search bar you would get engineers who have DevOps and AWS on their profile, and have at least one of the keywords API, Cloud or CI/CD on their profile:

(DevOps AND AWS) (API OR Cloud OR CI/CD)

There's a lot more you can do with search operators so if you want to learn more on how to build a targeted search with operators, you can check out this article:

Complete boolean guide‍