What LinkedIn Recruiter costs a company that hires two engineers a year
Recruiter is priced for people who hire every week. If you hire twice a year, the seat costs more per hire than most of the alternatives, and the reply rates do not improve with the price.
LinkedIn Recruiter is the default tool for finding engineers, and for an in-house recruiting team it earns its keep. The question this post answers is narrower: what does it cost a company that hires an engineer twice a year, and what does the money buy?
The short version is that the seat is priced for volume, and at two hires a year you are paying volume prices for a search you could run in other ways. The longer version has numbers in it.
What the seat costs
LinkedIn sells two products under the Recruiter name, and does not publish a price list for the bigger one.
- Recruiter Lite is listed at around $170 a month, roughly £1,600 a year on an annual plan. It gives you advanced search, a monthly allowance of InMails, and not much else.
- Recruiter Corporate, the full product, is quoted by buyers in 2026 at somewhere between $9,000 and $15,000 per seat per year, call it £7,000 to £12,000, with the price rising most years. It adds the full candidate database, more InMails, team features and integrations.
Neither price includes anyone's time. It is the licence to search and message.
What that is per hire
Divide the seat by the number of hires it produced and the picture changes with volume.
| Hires a year | Lite, £1,600 a year | Corporate, £9,500 a year |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | £800 per hire | £4,750 per hire |
| 6 | £270 per hire | £1,600 per hire |
| 20 | £80 per hire | £475 per hire |
At twenty hires a year the Corporate seat is a rounding error. At two it is a meaningful chunk of what an agency would charge for the same hire, and we set out that comparison in what it really costs to hire a software engineer in the UK. And unlike the agency fee, you pay it whether or not you hired anyone.
What the money actually buys
Three things, and it is worth being precise about each.
Search. Recruiter's filters over a very large database are genuinely good, and the Lite seat gets most of them. The catch for engineering roles is that LinkedIn only knows what people wrote on LinkedIn, and a lot of strong engineers write very little there. Their GitHub, their talks and their side projects are not in the index.
InMail. A monthly allowance of messages to people you are not connected to. Reply rates on InMail sit around 18 to 25 percent for recruiters who personalise, and a good deal lower for the template-driven messages most seats send. Engineers in particular have learned to ignore anything that opens with "I came across your profile".
A place to keep the pipeline. Projects, notes, team sharing. Useful if several people are recruiting. Redundant if the hiring manager is doing it alone.
The thing you might expect and do not get is any help writing the message, screening the reply, or deciding who is worth an interview. Recruiter is a search and messaging tool. The judgement is yours, and so are the hours.
When the seat is worth it
If you have a recruiter, in-house or contract, who is running searches most weeks, buy the seat and do not think about it again. The per-hire cost is small and the database is the best there is for the profile-heavy part of the market.
If you hire a couple of times a year, the cases for the seat are weaker but real: you hire for very specific profiles where the filters matter, or you already have a recruiter on the team who would use it between searches.
What to do instead at low volume
At two hires a year the options that make sense share a shape: pay for the search when you run one, not for the licence to run one.
- A contingent agency costs nothing until the hire and 15 to 25 percent of salary when it lands. Expensive per hire, free between hires.
- Lite plus your own time is the cheapest licence and the most expensive hours. It works if the hiring manager has the weeks; we set out how many in how long a UK engineering hire takes.
- An agent that charges per action turns the search into a variable cost. HireBrain scans a profile for about £0.05, writes and sends a personalised email for about £0.50, and charges £25 when a candidate clears the technical screen, with £2,500 on a hire. A search that scans 400 profiles and writes to 120 of them costs about £80 in credits, and nothing in the months you are not hiring.
The point is not that Recruiter is overpriced. It is priced correctly for the customer it was built for, and a company hiring twice a year is not that customer. Pay per search, and put the seat money towards the salary.