LinkedIn Recruiter Pricing and Tier Comparison (2024) - Lite, Professional, Corporate

LinkedIn Recruiter is a tool used both in-house and externally through staffing/recruiting firms to find and source qualified candidates.

It’s safe to say it tends to work fairly well. LinkedIn is the single largest professional social networking site after all, so there’s an extremely large number of candidates to work with.

The only problem is there’s a lot of mystery surrounding a lot of LinkedIn’s offerings, and LinkedIn Recruiter is no different.

They don’t explain the features and benefits very well, nor do they break down the tiers or the according pricing very well.

People are generally left in the dark and confused about LinkedIn Recruiter.

The goal of this article is to change that. Let’s start with the basics.

What does LinkedIn Recruiter do?

Three main things:

1. Searches for candidates

With LinkedIn Recruiter, you have access to LinkedIn's database of over 740 million plus profiles, which includes professionals from a wide range of industries and locations.

That said, not only can LinkedIn Recruiter help candidates find you, it also allows you to search for candidates using a variety of criteria, including job title, location, industry, and skills.

You can use advanced filters to narrow your search from 740 million plus and find the most qualified candidates.

2. Screens candidates

LinkedIn Recruiter allows you to track the progress of candidates through the recruitment process, including scheduling interviews and making notes about their qualifications and fit for the role.

LinkedIn Recruiter also includes tools that allow you to collaborate with team members and share candidates, notes, and other recruitment-related information.

3. Provides the ability to reach out to candidates

With LinkedIn Recruiter, you can send direct messages called InMails to candidates through the platform. These messages allow you to connect with potential candidates and start conversations about job opportunities.

How does LinkedIn Recruiter work?

Once you’ve obtained a LinkedIn Recruiter subscription, you’ll see a new icon appear in your LinkedIn navigation bar:

Click on it, and then you’ll have to create a new job:

Next, fill out your desired job information:

Then add your desired screening questions:

Now, at this point, you’ll receive the option to pay additional money to receive better placement.

Obviously, this part is up to you, but you can decline it and accept the free (but still paid) option.

After that, click post!

You can then begin the process of going through candidates that found you, or actively seeking candidates out, and then reaching out within the LinkedIn Recruiter platform.

The tiers of LinkedIn Recruiter

LinkedIn has tailored its Recruiter offerings to cater to a wide range of recruitment needs:

• LinkedIn Recruiter Lite- An entry-level solution.
• LinkedIn Recruiter Professional Services - Specifically designed for staffing agencies.
• LinkedIn Recruiter Corporate- A comprehensive tool for established businesses.

They have a few key differences:

Search features

Messaging features

2024 LinkedIn Recruiter pricing

LinkedIn doesn’t make its Recruiter pricing easily available. However, recent insights suggest:

• Recruiter Lite: $170 per month per seat
• Recruiter Professional Services: unsure, the pricing isn't available on site and the sales department wouldn't give me a answer, but estimated to start at around $850 per month per seat
• Recruiter Corporate: it’s suspected to be priced at around $1,080 per month per seat

(Still no response days later.)

The important thing to keep in mind here is the numbers above are really only to give you an idea—these prices vary based on region and specific company/sales agreements.

You can sign up for Recruiter Lite yourself right now for $170 per month per seat, the rest go through the LinkedIn sales department (which is a bit… painful, as seen above).

Meet Proxycurl: an alternative to LinkedIn Recruiter

While LinkedIn Recruiter offers a robust set of features, another great competitor for finding and sourcing qualified candidates for your business, or other businesses (if you’re a staffing agency) is Proxycurl.

(Hello! That’s us.)

Proxycurl steps in where LinkedIn's offerings fall short, particularly in terms of data access and integration capabilities.

Proxycurl is a B2B data provider and enrichment API that’s partially powered by 472 million publicly scraped LinkedIn profiles and counting (I say partially because we use more than just LinkedIn, which is part of our secret sauce).

This means that Proxycurl users can pull comprehensive information about potential candidates, including their current and past job positions, names, companies, work/personal emails, phone number, and more, all without ever needing to actually use LinkedIn itself.

Let me show you how:

Using Proxycurl to find qualified candidates

There are a couple of different ways to prospect for hires with Proxycurl. The main endpoint will remain the same, though, which will be the Person Search Endpoint.

Finding candidates based on work history for specific companies

Let’s say we’re looking to hire a software developer that has worked for a large software company already.

Using some simple Python along with our Person Search Endpoint, we could search for a software developer that has previously worked for Stripe:

import json, requests

headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + 'Your_API_Key_Here'}

api_endpoint = 'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/search/person/'

params = {

    'country': 'US',

    'past_company_linkedin_profile_url': 'https://www.linkedin.com/company/stripe',

    'enrich_profiles': 'enrich',

    'page_size': '10',

    'past_role_title':'(?i)software developer',

}

response = requests.get(api_endpoint, params=params, headers=headers)

result = response.json()

print(json.dumps(result, indent=2))

That will return an enriched list of anyone that has previously officially worked for Stripe per the official LinkedIn company URL.

To change from previous employees past_role_title to active employees, you would simply change your parameters slightly and switch it to current_role_title.

To adjust the above script to use more than one company, you could simply edit the the Python script above accordingly:

import json, requests

headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + 'Your_API_Key_Here'}

api_endpoint = 'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/search/person/'

params = {

    'country': 'US',

    'enrich_profiles': 'enrich',

    'page_size': '10',

    'past_role_title':'(?i)software engineer',

    'past_company_name':'Stripe|PayPal',

}

response = requests.get(api_endpoint, params=params, headers=headers)

result = response.json()

print(json.dumps(result, indent=2))

That’s one way. We could also drop the company based filtering.

Finding candidates based on industries worked in

Now let’s say we don’t have any specific companies in mind, but we know the relevant industry, and we’re also looking for a specific role as well as a specific academic field of study.

We could use the following Python script to find a qualified candidate:

import json, requests

headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + 'Your_API_Key_Here'}

api_endpoint = '[https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/search/person/](https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/search/person/)'

params = {

 'country': 'US',

 'enrich_profiles': 'enrich',

 'page_size': '10',

 'current_role_title':'(?i)senior marketing manager',

'education_field_of_study':'(?i)computer science'

'industries':'hospital & health care',

}

response = requests.get(api_endpoint, params=params, headers=headers)

result = response.json()

print(json.dumps(result, indent=2))

Now let’s say you need to hire in a specific city.

No problem, we could change the above script to only search for candidates in the city of Los Angeles for instance. Just use the city parameter.

Here’s another example:

import json, requests

headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + 'Your_API_Key_Here'}

api_endpoint = '[https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/search/person/](https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/search/person/)'

params = {

 'country': 'US',

 'enrich_profiles': 'enrich',

 'page_size': '10',

 'current_role_title':'(?i)senior marketing manager',

'education_field_of_study':'(?i)computer science'

'industries':'hospital & health care',

'city':'los angeles',

}

response = requests.get(api_endpoint, params=params, headers=headers)

result = response.json()

print(json.dumps(result, indent=2))

Easy.

Now let me show you another way to source talent with a different API endpoint.

The cheapest way to poach talent maybe… ever?

Using the Person Search Endpoint above is one way to do it, but it does cost 38 credits per search for a result (base rate, plus extra for extra parameters, more on that later).

One of the cheapest ways to poach talent at scale is to simply use our Employee Listing Endpoint instead to export an enriched list of talent from an ideal company that your ideal candidate might come from.

Let’s say we’re an email marketing company, and we want to hire someone with technical background in sending marketing emails at scale, namely a software engineer.

Using a bit of Python, we could cheaply export a list of past/current/all employees for a specific company. Here’s how:

import requests

import json

api_key = 'Your_API_Key_Here'

headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + api_key}

api_endpoint = 'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/linkedin/company/employees/'

params = {

    'url': 'https://www.linkedin.com/company/convertkit',

    'country': 'us',

    'enrich_profiles': 'skip',

    'role_search': 'software engineer',

    'page_size': '10',

    'employment_status': 'all',

    'sort_by': 'recently-joined',

    'resolve_numeric_id': 'false',

}

# Make the request

response = requests.get(api_endpoint, params=params, headers=headers)

# Pretty print the response

formatted_response = json.dumps(response.json(), indent=4)

print(formatted_response)

That searches for a list of non-enriched profiles (to save costs) of all (past or present) software engineers for ConvertKit, and then returns you their LinkedIn profile URL:

For example:

Of course, if you wanted to, you could also enrich this result by enabling enrichment instead of skipping it.

Are you starting to see the value here?

I could keep going (you can search for candidates in more ways than just the ways mentioned above), but I think you get the point here.

With Proxycurl, you can search for and access millions of enriched public profiles to use for your benefit.

Further, you can automate the whole thing and build it into your workflow. It’s all scalable and reliable.

With LinkedIn Recruiter, none of that is possible.

Now, the main thing I will admit that LinkedIn Recruiter has us beat on are:

1. A larger dataset. It is their platform, after all.
2. InMail / on platform promotion for your job posts. Obviously, we can’t do that.

But what we can do is find qualified candidates for you and hand them to you in a convenient medium (API), all for an extremely competitive price.

Proxycurl vs. LinkedIn Recruiter pricing

We work on a credit-based system, so depending on the parameters and enrichment options used, pricing can vary, but once you compare them to LinkedIn Recruiter’s pricing, it is extremely fair.

Our cheapest subscription starts at only $49 for 2,500--or, our $299 monthly subscription would give you 25,000 credits per month to use.

To give you some reference on what certain actions cost with our API:

• Our Person Search Endpoint uses 35 credits base rate plus 3 credits per result returned, with additional credits varying based on parameters used.
• Our Employee Listing Endpoint uses 3 credits per employee returned, with additional credits varying based on parameters used.

Here's a detailed breakdown:

For a full breakdown of endpoint pricing, and the amount of credits different endpoints or parameters use, check out our documentation here.

We also provide a pay-as-you-go option--avoiding the requirement of a subscription all together; something LinkedIn Recruiter doesn't offer.

Final thoughts

LinkedIn Recruiter continues to be a major player in recruitment. But as with all tools, it's crucial to evaluate if it's the right fit for your needs, keeping in mind the features, costs, and potential alternatives like Proxycurl.

For some brands without the technical capabilities of integrating something like an API into their processes, LinkedIn Recruiter might be the right option for you.

While Proxycurl isn’t complicated, LinkedIn Recruiter is very simple and works directly with your existing LinkedIn account in your browser.

For others that value optimal workflows and scalability, Proxycurl might be the right option for you.

Either way, you’ll need to weigh out the individual pros and cons of relying on either option for sourcing candidates.

The good news for you is that both options provide you with a free trial; so you can give both a spin before exchanging over your hard earned dollars.

Now is the time of the article where I ask you to:

Create your Proxycurl account today

You can click here to create your Proxycurl account for free.

You’ll get started with 15 credits which aren’t much, but allow you to perform a couple of actions and get a feel for the API.

After that, you can continue with our pay-as-you-go plans. As low as $10 could buy you 100 credits that will then allow you to perform several actions (or you could opt for a subscription for as low as $49 per month).

From that point forward, the world is your oyster, and you can use our vast dataset to search for qualified candidates.

Just click here to create your account and get started today.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. If you’re interested, we also sell our entire publicly scraped LinkedIn dataset. It’s called LinkDB. Some more details on that are available here.

Also, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out to us at “[email protected]”.