Is LinkedIn Premium Worth it for Recruiters?

LinkedIn is a foundational tool in the recruitment industry, but is LinkedIn Premium worth it for hiring managers and recruitment teams?

With features like advanced filtering, InMail credits and candidate insights, LinkedIn Premium plays a crucial role in most recruitment pipelines. However, many recruiters still face frustrations when relying on LinkedIn too heavily, including limited contact options and low candidate quality.

In this article, we’ll answer the question is LinkedIn Premium worth it for recruiters? by providing a balanced review of the tool’s core features and common pain points. We’ll also look at ways to boost ROI, including using LinkedIn Premium with Kalent’s recruitment co-pilot.

Why Do Recruiters Sign Up for LinkedIn Premium?

Most professionals have some kind of LinkedIn presence, whether they’re actively looking for work, building their CV or are happy in their current role. LinkedIn allows people of all industries to share their expertise, make connections and become thought leaders in their niche. As a networking tool, it is second to none.

Recruiters in particular rely on LinkedIn to post jobs, process applications and seek out new talent. And with advanced candidate search filters, InMail credits, AI-driven smart suggestions and candidate tracking, the tool can provide a lot of value.

The platform offers several benefits for internal recruiters at large companies, especially those who are hoping to reach passive applicants and track them through a single pipeline.

Recruiters in competitive markets also use LinkedIn Premium to engage top talent – however, many face diminishing returns as candidate inboxes grow increasingly saturated.

So, with all of this in mind, is LinkedIn Premium worth it for recruiters? Let’s look at the cost of the tool, as well as the value it provides.

How Much is LinkedIn Premium for Recruiters?

Pricing tiers for LinkedIn Premium are difficult to find online. LinkedIn intentionally keeps pricing vague because of its market and account-based pricing strategies, according to HeroHunt.

However, there are basically two plans for recruiters: LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Recruiter Lite. The main difference between the two is the number of search filters you can use, as well as the monthly InMail credits (30 vs 150), which essentially let you “cold message” contacts. LinkedIn Recruiter can also be shared by multiple people, whereas Lite only offers a single seat.

Within LinkedIn Recruiter, you can choose between Corporate and Professional Services.

Other paid LinkedIn plans include LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Premium Business, but these don’t necessarily meet the needs of recruiters.

LinkedIn Premium plans are billed annually. It is difficult to find accurate information about how much each plan costs, but estimates suggest Recruiter Lite is available for around $170 per month, with bigger plans costing upwards of $4000 annually.

Is LinkedIn Premium Worth it? Limitations and Drawbacks

For smaller teams or less-established professionals, the question is LinkedIn Premium worth it will depend on your specific hiring goals and needs. Recruiter Lite is seemingly the most affordable option, but purchasing more seats or upgrading to higher tiers will quickly become very expensive.

The need for additional InMail credits or additional enrichment tools can add unexpected costs, and recruiters often end up layering other software on top of LinkedIn Premium, increasing overheads even more.

Limitations of LinkedIn Premium include:

Limited InMail Credits

If you're an active recruiter, 30 InMail credits won’t get you very far, limiting your outreach and making it harder for you to manage multiple roles or source talent at scale.

InMail Competition

With so many recruiters and hiring managers competing for space on LinkedIn, it will be difficult to stand out in candidates’ inboxes, lowering response rates.

Lack of Personalization

It’s difficult to personalize outreach messages unless you contact each candidate manually. If you want to send automated messages – say, to passive applicants – you won’t be able to personalize them or add relevant context. Again, people tend to ignore generic messages from recruiters, so this will affect your response rates.

No Contextual Adaptation to Job Ads

Is LinkedIn Premium worth it if it doesn’t let you adapt your outreach to the job ad or your intent? Without advanced contextual filters, you’ll be inundated with applicants who don’t necessarily meet your requirements, which could increase your workload without improving results.

Manual Admin

All this leads to lots of manual admin tasks, making your job more time-consuming and difficult, potentially without payoff.

Benefits of LinkedIn Premium for Recruiters

Despite its limitations, LinkedIn Premium can add substantial value for recruiters working for large companies or enterprises. It offers huge candidate pools, data-rich profiles and insights into passive talent. For companies with the budget for more advanced premium plans, a subscription can prove worthwhile

LinkedIn Premium is also helpful for niche headhunters, with advanced search filters to help you uncover specialized talent that may not be available through free LinkedIn plans.

For recruiters with high-volume hiring needs, Premium can accelerate first-touch outreach and help with pipeline tracking. Insights like job-seeking status (Open to Work), skills highlights and other advanced filters can also speed up the shortlisting process.

Is LinkedIn Premium Worth It When Combined with Kalent?

Depending on your specific needs and budget, LinkedIn Premium might be worth it when combined with a recruitment co-pilot like Kalent.

Recruiters often end up supplementing Premium with external enrichment and messaging tools, because it doesn’t offer everything you need in one place. By contrast, Kalent has everything you need for the sourcing and recruiting process in one end-to-end platform.

Kalent isn’t a replacement for LinkedIn Premium, but it acts as a co-pilot to help recruiters with context-driven search, integrated job ads and personalized outreach at scale.

Using Kalent, recruiters can increase their reply rates with multi-channel, contextual and personalized messaging. Go from the industry standard response rates of 10-20% to 30-60% and beyond, with high-quality talent sourcing.

Is LinkedIn Premium Worth it? Final Verdict from Kalent

So, is LinkedIn Premium worth it for recruiters? Our final verdict is that LinkedIn is incredibly valuable when used in conjunction with other tools, but it shouldn’t be relied upon as a primary recruitment platform.

LinkedIn Premium offers great search functionality and candidate insights, but it doesn’t give you the full picture of a candidate’s availability or suitability for your job ad. It also struggles to perform outreach at scale, relying purely on InMail and comment sections for communication.

It’s also difficult to automate personalized messaging on LinkedIn. Most automated messages are generic and non-specific, leading to poor response rates and disappointing ROI.

As an AI co-pilot, Kalent is the perfect complementary tool to use alongside LinkedIn Premium to help you achieve better recruitment outcomes. Kalent automatically enriches contact data, automates multi-channel engagement (including LinkedIn, mail, SMS and WhatsApp, depending on region) and dramatically improves response rates through personalized messaging.

Whatever your niche or sector, Kalent will optimize your entire recruitment process, leading to reduced costs, streamlined hiring processes and better response rates.

Book a demo today and we’ll show you exactly how it works.

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