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LinkedIn Recruiter vs. LinkedIn Recruiter Lite – What are the Differences?

If you’re researching whether LinkedIn Recruiter or LinkedIn Recruiter Lite is right for you, it’s probably because you’re interested in leveraging the power of the largest professional social platform in the world.

When discussing the differences, the trend you’ll notice is that LinkedIn Recruiter Lite is a leaner option that’s better suited to smaller firms with lower volume recruiting needs.

While LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Recruiter Lite share functionality in many ways, we’ll discuss a few key differences in this post, including features, pricing, and more.

Let’s get started.

Search Feature Differences

Unparalleled search capabilities keep LinkedIn Recruiter and Recruiter Lite on the map, among other recruiting platforms. However, Recruiter Lite does have a few restrictions.

LinkedIn Network Access

For example, LinkedIn Recruiter gives you access to the entire platform of more than 700 million professionals. However, LinkedIn Recruiter Lite only allows you to search among up to third-degree connections.

Search Filters

LinkedIn is a massive database of information, including details on potential candidates as granular as spoken languages, the college they attended, and how many years they’ve been at their current or past positions. With Recruiter Lite you get access to more than 20 filters. But with Recruiter, you get more than 40, including filters for spoken languages, skill assessments, and whether or not they’re open to contract work.

LinkedIn Recruiter Search allows you to access over 40 filters to find qualified candidates — LinkedIn Recruiter provide access to over 40 search filters

Candidate Insights and Spotlights

Candidate Insights (another feature exclusive to Recruiter), highlights key characteristics of candidates so your hiring team can easily view things like years of experience.

Spotlights is a great feature available only to Recruiter users (not Recruiter Lite) that allows you to filter according to which candidates are more likely to engage with your company. Here are a few examples of spotlights:

Internal candidates
Open to work
Are more likely to respond
Engaged with talent brand
Have company connections
Past applicants

Candidate Tags and Search Alerts

Recruiter users can add tags to candidates to make filtering and categorization easier.

Recruiter and Recruiter Lite users can receive candidate search alerts, but the maximum number they can receive differs. With this feature, you can save a specific search and then turn on email alerts that you’ll receive either weekly or monthly. Recruiter users can receive up to 50, and Recruiter Lite users can receive up to 10.

Messaging Feature Differences

Fortunately, LinkedIn Recruiter is more than just a candidate search platform – you can reach out to candidates from within the LinkedIn platform.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to export contact information from LinkedIn. You might be disappointed if you’re looking to run a search, export candidate contact info, and start working your way down your list. If this sounds like your style of recruiting, check out the end of this article to learn more about a quick and easy way to export candidate contact info.

InMail Messaging on LinkedIn Recruiter — Send messages directly to potential candidates with InMail

InMail Messages

InMail is LinkedIn’s messaging platform. While not everybody on LinkedIn is receptive to them, these InMails can be an effective way to reach and engage with candidates. One of the things that makes this easy for recruiters is the ability to access your InMails and other features while on the go with the LinkedIn Recruiter app.

Both LinkedIn Recruiter and Recruiter Lite offer the ability to use InMails, but the limits are different, with the offering up to 150 InMails and the former up to 30 per month.

InMail Pooling

InMail pooling is not available to Recruiter Lite. However, Recruiter offers its users the ability to pool InMail allotments across users on your account, which opens up the ability for more active recruiters to take advantage of greater-than-average InMail credits as needed.

Bulk InMail Messages

Recruiter Lite does not have the bulk InMail feature. With LinkedIn Recruiter, you can easily create InMail messages in bulk – up to 25 messages at once. You also can easily create templates to be used across the users on your account.

Collaboration Feature Differences

As a reminder, Recruiter Lite is suited to smaller firms and isn’t geared for collaboration. On the other hand, Recruiter has a few collaboration features that make it easy for multiple users on the account to work together and organize more efficiently.

Multi-user dashboard

For example, with Recruiter, you can choose which projects will be private or public. If you choose private, then only members of the project can access it. If you choose public, anyone on your dashboard can access the project.

Collaboration Across Shared Projects

Another perk of LinkedIn Recruiter is the ability to share projects. The users you share the project with will be able to:

View your saved searches
See what jobs are open
Save new profiles to the project
Share the project with other team members

Free Collaborator Licenses

Sometimes, you’ll want to share candidate information, whether it’s with hiring managers or clients. Rather than requiring a full-fledged LinkedIn Recruiter account for everyone, 20 Recruiter licenses are provided, which makes sharing candidate profiles easy without the need to get them on a full Recruiter account.

Additional Collaboration Features

There are a few more collaboration features that make communication and organization within the platform more streamlined and intuitive, including @mentions in Notes, the ability to share message trees (so everybody is current on candidate conversations), and the sharing of recruiting activity.

Administration, Integrations, and Reporting Feature Differences

Another crucial aspect of the platform is its reporting capabilities, which both LinkedIn Recruiter and Recruiter Lite have. The difference is in the depth and types of reporting and what systems you’re able to integrate with them.

Data Ownership

Since Recruiter Lite is suited for individuals rather than multi-user companies, the data is owned by the individual subscriber. For Recruiter, the data is owned by and stays with your company.

Integration

Recruiter users can seamlessly integrate the applicant tracking systems of LinkedIn’s over 28 ATS partners. Likewise, Recruiter can integrate with LinkedIn Talent Insights, LinkedIn Talent Hub, and other LinkedIn recruitment marketing solutions.

Reporting

LinkedIn Recruiter Lite provides its user with two types of reports – InMail analytics and job analytics. Recruiter gives the user access to these plus recruiter usage reports, pipeline analytics reports, and cross-contract and custom reporting.

Pricing Differences

Please note that any pricing references provided here may differ from actual LinkedIn Recruiter and Recruiter Lite pricing, as it varies by region and currency.

You will most likely have to talk with a sales rep before learning the pricing. but below, we’ve provided at least a point of reference for you, broken down by annual or monthly payments:

Annual Payment

Recruiter – around $825/ month if billed annually ($9000)
Recruiter Lite – around $140/ month if billed annually ($1680)

Monthly Payment

Recruiter – around $1000/ month
Recruiter Lite – around $170/ month

What About Exporting Candidate Contact Information from LinkedIn Recruiter or Recruiter Lite?

In summary, there are different features for Recruiter and Recruiter Lite, but it comes down to the size of your organization and how many hires you (or your team) plan on making.

We’ve already established that there is no simple, built-in way to export contact information from LinkedIn Recruiter or Recruiter Lite. This has been a criticism of an otherwise ideal recruiting platform. But now, we have a way for you to do exactly that with just a few clicks.

It’s called Wiza, and you only need to set up a free account to get started. Our platform will empower you to approach candidate outreach in your own way. Just run a search in Recruiter or Recruiter Lite and then export the verified contact information of everyone in your search as a CSV.