LinkedIn has cornered the market in the recruitment game and has just under 1 billion users in over 200 countries around the world. It offers recruiters the opportunity to search for and engage with top talent. 

The platform is free to sign up, connect with someone you know, and message them.

However, for recruiters, this isn’t enough. Recruiters need to exhaust every option and turn every leaf in the pursuit of the perfect candidate. 

Here, we’ll explore the downsides of LinkedIn and introduce you to your alternative options.

Downsides of LinkedIn Recruiter

Next to the benefit of having most professionals on one platform, there are some major downsides of recruiting on LinkedIn compared to alternative platforms.

Some of these include:

• Costly Recruitment Packages
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• Limited Search Filters
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• Limited Access to Premium Features
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• High Competition for Top Talent
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• Vague Pool of Candidates

1. Expensive recruitment packages

LinkedIn offers the Recruiter Corporate and Recruiter Lite packages for recruiters searching for and messaging candidates.

The prices of these are:

• Recruiter Lite: $170 per month for a single license, and $270 per month for additional licenses (up to 5).
  
  

• Recruiter Corporate: $12,960 per license annually (around $1,080 monthly).

These packages are positioned on a separate platform adjacent to LinkedIn called LinkedIn Recruiter and contain a Boolean search to find candidates.

Boolean searches allow you to combine words and phrases using the words AND, OR, and NOT (known as Boolean operators) to limit, broaden, or define your search.

Additional costs to LinkedIn Recruiter

The biggest add-on to LinkedIn Recruiter is InMails. InMails are messages to those outside of your network. Your monthly allowance on Recruiter Corporate is 150, and 30 on Recruiter Lite.

So if you’re new to recruitment or entering a new market, you’ll need more than just your monthly allowance of InMails to engage with potential candidates, especially if the average response rate is between 18-25%. 

So, how much are additional InMails? Well, they’re priced at a staggering $10 per piece. Meaning, if you want an additional 100 InMail messages, in which you’ll most likely get 18-25 responses, it’ll cost you $1,000.

All this does is enable larger recruitment firms to keep a stronghold of the market as they have the capital to invest in Recruiter Licenses and InMails, and thus will almost always be the first to reach out to candidates.

2. Limited search filters

LinkedIn Recruiter’s search filters are not the most comprehensive when searching for the right candidates.

Recruiters can search using keywords, location, industry, and job titles, but quite often the search doesn’t always provide accurate results.

A common frustration for recruiters is the discrepancy between LinkedIn search results and the specified search criteria. Irrelevant profiles often populate the search and extra time is needed to filter out profiles.

3. LinkedIn Basic is virtually impossible to recruit with

LinkedIn’s best features are available only to those who’ve subscribed to LinkedIn’s premium membership plans. The basic, free version of LinkedIn is almost impossible to recruit on as you’ll be limited by the number of profiles you can view and connection requests you can send (100 per week).

Even then, you can only buy additional InMails if you already have access to a premium product.

The free version is simply not sufficient when compared to the investments made by large recruiting firms to find, source, and engage with candidates. 

4. It’s highly competitive

LinkedIn is the most popular networking platform in the world and has around 300 million monthly active users and a total of around 1 billion profiles, making it number 6 on the list of the most popular social platforms.

So it’s safe to say that there are a lot of recruiters vying for the same candidates. As a result, the best talent on LinkedIn is constantly flooded with job offers and opportunities in their inboxes – so much so that many of them disableInMails as they become overwhelmed.

The challenge of standing out from the competition to court high-quality candidates is quite a daunting task given the saturation of the market. 

5. There’s a vague pool of candidates

LinkedIn is a broad professional networking site, spanning multiple industries and jobs. As a result, many recruiters struggle to weed out all the irrelevant people on the platform.

In addition, the LinkedIn algorithms don’t let you have any control over which audiences see your regular feed posts.

Alternative sites like GitHub and Xing have seen some rapid growth in recent years as they focus on specific segments, such as software developers, or particular countries/regions around the world. 

To conclude, as a new recruitment agency or a freelance recruiter, recruiting on LinkedIn is getting less and less feasible with unaffordable recruitment packages, hyper-competitiveness, and a largely vague pool of candidates.

It’s better to see what else is out there before pulling the trigger.

The alternative

The best alternative to LinkedIn Recruiter is Juicebox, an AI-powered talent search engine that leverages advanced AI and natural language to pinpoint exactly who you’re looking for – all without needing to run a boolean search.  

Here's a quick rundown of its key features:

Advanced database: Juicebox utilizes artificial intelligence to search a massive database of over 800 million profiles from over 30 data sources around the web in real time.

Find candidates using natural language: It goes beyond traditional Boolean search and allows you to search for a candidate by prompting in natural language.

For example: Hey Juicebox, find me a Senior Python Engineer in San Francisco with 7+ years of experience. Give me a list of candidates who used to work for Apple, Amazon, or Google. 

And voila, your candidate shortlist is created. 

Specificity: You can refine and specify your search to a tee. The platform can filter candidates by job title, location, company affiliation, desired skills, published papers, niche, and more. 

Contact information: Gain access to accurate contact information like emails and phone numbers, and reach out to candidates directly. It is like having LinkedIn and Lusha in one.

Personalized outreach features: Juicebox has personalized AI email sequences designed to increase your responses by personalizing your outreach at scale.

Talent Insights: Analyze your talent pool in depth by exploring 15+ charts, enabling you to dive deeper into a specific company and to discover its talent strategy.

ATS Integration: Export all of the profiles in your shortlist straight to your ATS or CRM with a simple one-click integration. 

Juicebox (PeopleGPT) is a game-changer in modern recruitment and gives you access to hundreds of millions of profiles., engage with candidates at scale, find new leads, and get data-driven insights for a fraction of the price of LinkedIn Recruiter. 

Try it for free.