Recruiter Lite is LinkedIn's hiring tool for people who recruit a few people a year: small business owners, startups, managers who run their own hiring, independent recruiters. The full version, Recruiter, is aimed at in-house recruiting teams at large companies. Lite keeps the essentials for one person.
What Recruiter Lite adds
- 30 InMails a month to contact candidates outside your network. An InMail that gets a reply within 90 days is credited back to you.
- More than 20 search filters built for hiring: skills, years of experience, current and past roles, education, location, company.
- Access to profiles up to the 3rd degree, instead of only people close to your network.
- Suggested candidates every day, based on your searches and the profiles you saved.
- Projects to organise the candidates for a role, with notes and message history.
- Applicant tracking for your job posts in the same tool.
Recruiter Lite or Business?
Business gives you 15 InMails and unlimited profile search, which can be enough for a one-off hire. It lacks hiring-specific filters, projects and candidate suggestions. As soon as you are actively hiring more than one or two people a year, or the profiles you need are rare, Recruiter Lite saves a lot of time.
Compared with an agency
A recruitment agency often charges between 15 and 25% of the role's annual salary. For a €45,000 role, that is several thousand euros. Recruiter Lite does not replace a good agency's expertise on a very specialised role, but for profiles you can assess yourself, it gives you access to the same candidates for the price of a yearly subscription.
A five-step method for one role
- Write the target profile as three to five must-haves, not fifteen. For example: three years in accounts payable, SAP experience, based less than 40 minutes from Bristol.
- Turn it into a search with the filters and save it. Widen it if you get fewer than 50 results, narrow it above 500.
- Build a project of 30 to 50 profiles by reading their careers, not just their titles.
- Send a personal InMail: the role in one sentence, why their profile, what makes the role interesting, and a simple request ("a 15-minute call this week?").
- Track replies in the project, follow up once after a week, and move on to interviews.
An example message
Subject: Accounts payable role in Bristol, team of 6
Hi Sophie, I am hiring an accounts payable specialist for our Bristol office. Your SAP experience at a distributor is exactly what we are looking for. It is a permanent role with two days a week from home. Would you be up for a 15-minute call this week? Best regards, Anthony
What it does not do
Recruiter Lite is not a full applicant tracking system, and it does not guarantee replies: a good message is still essential. It does not replace your other channels either, such as job boards or referrals. It simply becomes the most direct one: you go and find candidates instead of waiting for them to apply.