Is the LinkedIn Recruiter tool worth it?

One of LinkedIn's most used tools is precisely Recruiter (or "Reclutador" in its Spanish translation). As LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world, it is easy to understand that it is interested not only in enabling talents to communicate and potentially find jobs with new companies, but also in making the effort to make it easier for those companies to search for potential candidates. That is exactly what this tool is about: it is designed to make the search for candidates easier, more efficient and faster. To achieve this, this Premium category includes, among other things, 150 InMails, providing the ability to contact those talents even if they are not direct contacts, additional filters, reports with more features, and the creation of projects and alerts.

But is the cost of this tool worth it? What are its advantages compared to the Lite version?

The short answer is that it depends. It depends on the individual needs of each company. In general, small and medium-sized companies may not see the expected ROI, or return on investment, for the costs of this tool, but let's explain the differences between the Lite version and the professional version in a bit more detail.

Reach: The professional version allows you to reach LinkedIn's entire network of contacts, which means that you have access to more than 200 million active users worldwide. In contrast, the Lite version allows you to reach contacts up to the third degree, which may be very broad or not, depending on the list you have.

Audience: Each of the versions is optimized for the audience that is expected, in a certain way, to use it. This means that the Pro version is aimed more at medium-sized and large companies and, therefore, at candidates suited to those profiles. In contrast, the Lite version is optimized more for small companies and even SMEs.

InMail messages: This is probably the biggest and most decisive difference, as it is also the one that adds the most value to the tool, giving you the possibility to communicate with people who are outside your network of contacts in a more professional and secure way, which in many cases guarantees higher response rates.

Filters: The number of filters in the different versions can mean that the search is faster or more efficient, thus giving access to more or less information.

Teamwork: The professional version offers the possibility of multi-user dashboards, mentioning members, sharing reports or creating shared projects; all of these are options that are limited in the Lite version.

These are important differences that, depending on the size of your company and the reach you want to have, you should take into account when using or deciding which tool best fits your requirements.

The costs associated with recruiting new personnel can come from many sources, from salaries in your Human Resources department, the purchase of or subscriptions to tools and programs such as those offered by LinkedIn, to the time it may take to find a specific talent and, of course, making sure that the talent found is truly suited to the job and to the company's profile, so as to reduce as much as possible the potential turnover rates. Tools such as Evalart can help you with this.

To conclude, I want to highlight one last option that Recruiter has among its tools: it highlights those candidates who are more likely to be interested in responding to the recruiter's message. But what does the tool look at to reach these conclusions? Connections: whether the person has any first-degree contact already working at the company. Whether they follow, have liked or have shared any post made from the business's profile. Finally, whether they have previously shown interest in any of the positions offered. This makes these contacts more receptive to recruiters. This information is very important, since it could save a lot of search time, and anything that can save time and, therefore, money is very valuable.