Issue #6: Will the rising cost of a Recruiter Corporate
account price independent recruiters out of the market?
LinkedIn was built by recruiters. It was not built by the millions of
individuals who have a few connections (more than 1/3 of LinkedIn® members have
one or fewer connections); it was built by recruiters with thousands of direct
connections.
Even today, if all recruiters closed their accounts,
LinkedIn would be a shell of itself and the networks of its members would shrivel.
Unfortunately, by pricing their flagship Recruiter Corporate
at $8,639.40 per year, most recruiters who do not already have a Recruiter
Corporate account cannot afford the price of entry.
So while large corporations, through volume discounts might
pay $1,500.00 per year per account, the little guy takes a beating.
True, LinkedIn offers lower-priced products – but, they also
offer fewer features and are less effective.
LinkedIn is also reducing the capabilities with the
Recruiter Corporate account. Earlier
this year they started charging for InMail messages sent through Recruiter to
group members. For recruiters who
heavily use InMail this represents a significant price increase without raising
the base price.
In 2013 they removed a key sorting feature, making it more
time-consuming to identify potential recruits.
It’s fair to say that if LinkedIn continues to see itself as
a monopoly, and set its pricing accordingly, when the old guard recruiters
retire you will know why it’s tough to find a knowledgeable recruiter.
Solutions
What can LinkedIn do?
Plenty. They could
start by re-instating features of the Recruiter account that they have
removed.
From a pricing standpoint, I don’t think they care if
independent recruiters can afford it, if they can find enough corporations who
are willing to commit. So far, that doesn’t
seem to be a problem as their Talent Solutions products are growing at a faster
pace than the rest of LinkedIn and will exceed $1B in sales in 2014.
As a public company, LinkedIn answers to Wall
Street. Wall Street wants results today,
not in 2019. If LinkedIn’s growth levels
out, the more pressure there will be to raise prices even further.
If they continue to grow, they won’t be reducing prices –
why should they? If their growth should slow,
there will be more pressure to raise prices to satisfy Wall Street.
They won’t be reducing prices until there is an alternative
to LinkedIn.
What can individual members do?
Unfortunately, existing recruiters can’t realistically protest
by cancelling their account – the price for re-entry would be much steeper AND
since their data in their Recruiter account cannot be exported, all of their
data in the account would be lost. In
addition, Recruiter account contracts are for one year – they would still have
to pay for the remaining months even if they were not using it.
Regardless of the type of account a recruiter may use - anywhere from a free account up to Recruiter Corporate, almost all recruiters use LinkedIn because it is a treasure trove of potential clients and candidates. Even though larger companies have a significant price advantage, the independent recruiters will continue to use LinkedIn until there is a better option.
