LinkedIn Recruiter is a recruiting tool developed by LinkedIn to help companies find, connect with, and hire talent through the LinkedIn platform. As LinkedIn’s premium recruiting product, LinkedIn Recruiter offers a suite of features such as advanced search, InMail messaging, talent pool organization, and analytics to optimize and simplify recruiting efforts. But how well does LinkedIn Recruiter actually work for recruiters and hiring managers? In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at the key benefits of LinkedIn Recruiter, examine its main features and functionality, assess pros and cons based on user reviews, and ultimately determine how effective LinkedIn Recruiter is for recruiting top talent in today’s job market.
Key Benefits of LinkedIn Recruiter
There are several main advantages to using LinkedIn Recruiter for your hiring and recruiting needs:
– Access to broad, qualified talent pools: With over 740 million members, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform. LinkedIn Recruiter allows you to source candidates from this vast membership base who have the skills, experience, and qualifications you need.
– Advanced search and filtering capabilities: LinkedIn Recruiter offers robust search tools to find the right candidates faster. You can filter by skill, title, location, company, education, and more. Search syntax and Boolean operators help refine searches further.
– Recruiting analytics and insights: Recruiter provides data and insights such as candidate demographics, content engagement, talent pool composition, and source of hire reporting to inform your recruiting strategy.
– Candidate relationship management: The platform enables you to organize prospects with talent tags, stay up-to-date with automatic alerts and notifications, and nurture relationships through tools like InMail.
– Integration with LinkedIn Jobs: You can easily post jobs to LinkedIn through Recruiter and track applicants and job post performance.
– Mobile capabilities: LinkedIn Recruiter’s mobile app lets you manage recruiting tasks on-the-go.
Key Features and Functionality
LinkedIn Recruiter provides a wide range of features and functionality to enhance your recruiting experience:
– InMail: Send direct messages to prospects to introduce yourself, build relationships, and connect on opportunities.
– Talent Pools: Organize and segment candidates into different pipelines like prospects, leads, and applicants.
– Projects: Manage and collaborate on multiple hiring projects for different job roles or departments.
– Search Alerts: Get notified when new candidates who match your search criteria enter the system.
– TeamLink Collaboration: Add collaborators to work together on the same projects and candidate pools.
– Hiring Insights: See high-level analytics on pipeline volume, prospects, InMail replies, source of candidates and more.
– SmartSuggestions: Receive recommendations on jobs to promote to candidates based on their skills and interests.
– Auto Recruit: Use this automated recruiting assistant to draft messages and schedule follow ups.
LinkedIn Recruiter User Reviews
LinkedIn Recruiter earns generally positive reviews from users, although there are some downsides according to recruiters:
Pros:
– Wide access to qualified candidate pool
– Powerful search and filtering capabilities
– Useful analytics and insights
– Easy to stay organized with talent tagging
– Saves time with automation and bulk actions
Cons:
– Steep learning curve to use advanced features
– Maximum 300 InMail messages per month limit
– No integrated skills testing for candidates
– Missing some customization options
– Can be costly for smaller companies
– LinkedIn recruitment dominance means less talent in other networks
Positive User Review
“LinkedIn Recruiter has completely changed our recruiting game. The amount of time it saves with the bulk actions and automation frees up our days for more strategic tasks. I love having all of our prospects and candidates organized in one ATS-like system instead of using spreadsheets like we did before. The search is amazing to easily drill down to find our “purple squirrels” with very specific skill sets. Highly recommend!”
Critical User Review
“It takes a lot of time investment to really learn how to effectively use all the advanced features in Recruiter. I wish it was more intuitive and less complex. We are also frustrated by the InMail limit, as we go through the 300 monthly credits too quickly with our recruiting volume and need to purchase more.”
Effectiveness of LinkedIn Recruiter for Recruiting
Based on its various strengths and potential drawbacks, here is an assessment of how effective LinkedIn Recruiter is as a recruiting tool:
Wide access to candidates
With over 740 million members, LinkedIn Recruiter provides access to the largest professional network to source qualified, passive candidates you won’t find on job boards. This gives recruiters a major advantage in identifying and connecting with talent.
Powerful, flexible searching and filtering
Recruiter makes it easy for recruiters to slice and dice the LinkedIn database to narrow down the ideal candidates they want to target. Search functionality is very flexible and robust.
Useful analytics help optimize recruiting strategy
The analytics in Recruiter provide valuable data and insights that can help recruiters improve sourcing, candidate engagement, pipeline throughput, and overall recruiting performance.
Major time saver for organizing, messaging, and tracking candidates
The tool saves significant time in areas like talent pooling, bulk messaging, auto-reminders, and tracking candidate progress through the pipeline. This benefits recruiter productivity.
Room for improvement in user experience and customization
While powerful, Recruiter suffers from some complexity in the UX. It lacks some customization options that other ATS tools have regarding workflows, custom fields, etc.
Cost can be prohibitive for smaller companies
The various tiers of LinkedIn Recruiter range from $1,000 to over $10,000 per user annually. This may be out of reach for smaller companies with recruiting needs but restricted budgets.
Conclusion
In summary, LinkedIn Recruiter delivers significant advantages as a recruiting tool to tap into LinkedIn’s unparalleled talent pool and leverage recruiting analytics and automation. For larger companies, LinkedIn Recruiter is likely one of the top recruiting solutions available today. However, the product isn’t as customizable or user-friendly as some would like. Thecosts may also deter smaller companies even though they could benefit. Overall, LinkedIn Recruiter gets high marks for revolutionizing recruitment sourcing, analytics, and automation capabilities, but still has room for improvement when it comes to the end user experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers to some common questions about LinkedIn Recruiter:
What types of companies use LinkedIn Recruiter the most?
LinkedIn Recruiter is used across companies of all sizes and industries, but tends to have the most adoption among enterprise corporations, startup companies hiring at high volumes, and larger staffing and recruiting agencies.
What are LinkedIn Recruiter’s pricing tiers?
LinkedIn Recruiter is priced as follows:
– Recruiter Lite – $1,000/year per user
– Professional – $5,000/year per user
– Expert – $10,000/year per user
Discounts are available for large contracts of 100+ users.
Is there a free version of LinkedIn Recruiter?
No, all versions of LinkedIn Recruiter require a paid subscription. There is no free option, but they do offer free trials.
What is the difference between Recruiter Lite vs Professional?
Recruiter Lite has limited capabilities focused on core sourcing and outreach. Recruiter Professional unlocks more advanced features like talent pool collaboration, messaging templates, recruiting analytics, and Auto Recruit.
Can you use Recruiter with other ATS platforms?
Yes, Recruiter integrates with leading ATS like Greenhouse, Lever, SmartRecruiters, and more to pass screened candidates into your existing hiring processes.
Conclusion
LinkedIn Recruiter is one of the top recruiting tools available today that effectively transforms the way companies source, engage, and attract top talent. For enterprises and other companies that do high volume sourcing, LinkedIn Recruiter is likely an essential productivity tool to amplify their recruiting efforts. Smaller companies can also benefit but may find the cost prohibitive. Overall, Recruiter earns strong marks thanks to LinkedIn’s vast candidate pool and the tool’s sophisticated search, analytics, automation, and candidate management capabilities. But the user experience still leaves some room for improvement. For recruiters ready to take their LinkedIn sourcing to the next level, LinkedIn Recruiter is worth a close look despite some shortcomings that vendors continue working to address.