Hiring Assistant and Recruiter AI: the price LinkedIn will not print
LinkedIn publishes no price for Hiring Assistant — not a list price, not a per-credit price, not a tier price. It is an add-on to LinkedIn Recruiter, which has no published price either, so the question contains two unpublished numbers. The one Recruiter figure LinkedIn does print is Recruiter Lite at $170 a month, and Lite unlocks none of this: LinkedIn's own comparison table marks it as having no AI features and no Hiring Assistant. What LinkedIn does publish is 6 monthly credit tiers, and they are on this page.
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LinkedIn answers the price question with a form
This is the whole of LinkedIn's published position on what Hiring Assistant costs. Every figure written about it anywhere, including here, is an inference from these four facts.
“Hiring Assistant is available for purchase as an add-on to LinkedIn Recruiter. To learn more, fill out the form to contact sales or reach out to your LinkedIn representative directly.” No price appears there, nor in any of the four Hiring Assistant help articles.
LinkedIn Recruiter is quoted per seat on an annual contract. So even a disclosed add-on price would not give you a total, and the two numbers arrive together from the same representative.
The one Recruiter tier with a published price — $170 a month, $1,680 a year per seat — is excluded from the add-on entirely. It is not a cheaper way in; it is a different product.
Numbers circulate in search snippets attributed to public-sector procurement frameworks and reseller listings. Those are not LinkedIn list pricing, this site has not opened the documents, and an unverified figure on a page whose only value is verifiability is worse than no figure.
Recruiter Lite prices read from LinkedIn on 10 September 2026; the AI availability claims on this page read from LinkedIn's help centre on 20 September 2026. The two dates move separately, because checking whether Hiring Assistant is on RPS+ tells you nothing about what a Recruiter seat costs. US list prices in USD, excluding tax. LinkedIn bills in local currency in most markets and the converted figure is rarely a straight exchange-rate conversion, so treat this as the US baseline and confirm in your own billing page before committing to an annual term.
Recruiter Lite unlocks none of it
LinkedIn sells four Recruiter tiers and only one of them has a published price. Read the first row before the rest: the cheapest tier is not a reduced version of the AI, it has none.
| Recruiter Lite$170 / month | RPSQuote only | RPS+Quote only | LinkedIn RecruiterQuote only | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI features at all | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hiring Assistant add-on | No | Sources disagree | Yes | Yes |
| AI Search | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Advanced AI Search | No | No | English only | English only |
| AI bulk follow-up messages | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| InMail credits per seat per month | 30 | 100 | 140 | 150 |
Rows read from LinkedIn's four-tier comparison article and the two dedicated AI articles on 20 September 2026: differences between the four tiers ↗, Search with AI in Recruiter ↗ and AI Messages in Recruiter ↗. The InMail figures for RPS and RPS+ come from the same comparison table; the Lite and Recruiter figures come from this site's Recruiter pricing data. For the same question across Premium, Sales Navigator and Campaign Manager, see every LinkedIn AI feature by plan.
Two LinkedIn pages disagree about RPS
Can Recruiter Professional Services without the Plus buy Hiring Assistant? LinkedIn answers it twice, differently, and has not resolved it.
The Hiring Assistant row reads "Yes (add-on)" in the RPS column. Read it ↗
Each carries the same eligibility box naming LinkedIn Recruiter and RPS+ only. Read it ↗
This site publishes the Recruiter and RPS+ restriction, because four dedicated articles and the product page agree and the comparison table is a summary of them. LinkedIn has not resolved it, so an RPS customer should ask their representative rather than rely on either page.
4 of the 6 AI features have no help article
LinkedIn names 6 AI features inside Recruiter and writes a dedicated article for 2 of them. The third column is the difference between a feature you can plan around and a feature you will discover in the product.
| Feature | What it does | What LinkedIn publishes about its limits |
|---|---|---|
| AI Search | You describe the candidate you want, or paste a job description, and Recruiter turns that into filters instead of you setting them. | Advanced AI Search is limited to LinkedIn Recruiter and RPS+ with the account language set to English. RPS is excluded from it. Pasting a job description or an example job link to refine results is Advanced AI Search only, as is the AI summary on a candidate card explaining the fit. |
| AI Messages | It drafts a personalised InMail to a candidate, and will do it for a batch at once. | Tone and length controls exist only for Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Bulk send is capped at 25 candidates at a time. AI bulk follow-up messages are limited to LinkedIn Recruiter and RPS+. About Company personalization is LinkedIn Recruiter and RPS+ only, with the language set to English, and cannot be combined with custom content. |
| AI Projects | You describe the role in a chat box and Recruiter recommends projects to work from. | LinkedIn names this in its AI-features table and publishes no dedicated help article for it, so there are no published limits, languages or ceilings to report. |
| AI-Assisted Job Posts | It generates a job post, or reformats one you already have. | LinkedIn names this in its AI-features table and publishes no dedicated help article for it, so there are no published limits, languages or ceilings to report. |
| AI-Assisted Applicant Management | On the Talent pool page you narrow a large applicant pool by typing the criteria instead of filtering by hand. | LinkedIn names this in its AI-features table and publishes no dedicated help article for it, so there are no published limits, languages or ceilings to report. |
| AI insights in the InMail Report | Generated commentary on the InMail Report. | LinkedIn names this in its AI-features table and publishes no dedicated help article for it, so there are no published limits, languages or ceilings to report. |
Two caveats are true of every row and are not repeated in the table. None of these is available on Recruiter Lite, and LinkedIn says it is gradually making AI features available and that you might not have access to all of them — so a tier that lists a feature is not the same as an account that has it. Read from AI features in LinkedIn Recruiter ↗ on 20 September 2026.
LinkedIn publishes credits, not money
6 tiers, per license per month, across two contract types. These are the whole quantitative answer to “what do I get”, and the denominator for every calculation you can do before a quote arrives.
| Per license per month | Tier 1 | Tier 2 | Tier 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sourced candidates — LinkedIn Recruiter | 200 | 800 | 1,500 |
| Evaluated applicants — LinkedIn Recruiter | 3,500 | 9,000 | 25,000 |
| Sourced candidates — RPS+ | 150 | 600 | 1,500 |
| Evaluated applicants — RPS+ | 4,500 | 15,000 | 50,000 |
Read from Hiring Assistant licenses in Recruiter and RPS+ ↗ on 20 September 2026. LinkedIn's own tab label in that article is still “Recruiter Corporate”; the customer-facing name is now LinkedIn Recruiter, and both refer to the same contract. LinkedIn does not publish how a contract is assigned one of the three tiers.
Three recruiters on Tier 1 do not share 200 sourced candidates between them; each has 200. That is the detail that decides whether a tier is enough, and it is the one most people assume the other way round.
A candidate consumes a credit when they pass evaluation and are saved to the pipeline. Candidates you mark Not a Fit during setup consume nothing, so the tier number is candidates kept, not candidates looked at.
At the monthly ceiling Hiring Assistant stops until the next month or a tier upgrade. There is no top-up, which means the tier is a hard cap on throughput rather than a soft budget.
A candidate you added by hand is never evaluated — unless they later apply to the role, and only while the applicant-evaluation limit holds. The two credit pools are not interchangeable.
The number of Hiring Assistant licenses on a contract is capped by the number of Recruiter Searcher licenses on it, so the add-on cannot be bought for more people than already hold a seat.
Both batch actions are limited to 25 candidates per run. The same 25-candidate cap applies to bulk AI Messages on the Recruiter seat itself.
Three numbers LinkedIn publishes about its own product
A sales call will use these, so they are here — with the attribution that is easy to miss on the page they come from. None of the three is an independent measurement.
LinkedIn marketing copy, footnoted "Based on LinkedIn data (January 2026)". LinkedIn measuring its own product. No methodology, sample size or independent replication is published. Source ↗
LinkedIn marketing copy, footnoted "Based on LinkedIn data (January 2026)". LinkedIn measuring its own product. No methodology, sample size or independent replication is published. Source ↗
LinkedIn marketing copy, footnoted "Based on LinkedIn data (January 2026)". LinkedIn measuring its own product. No methodology, sample size or independent replication is published. Source ↗
LinkedIn first launched Hiring Assistant to charter customers in October 2024 and made it globally available in English by the end of September 2025. It remains in gradual rollout, which is why an eligible contract still does not guarantee access.
Ask for the tier before you ask for the price
You cannot negotiate a number you have never seen published. You can arrive knowing exactly what the number has to buy, which is the same leverage from the other end.
The tier is the only quantified thing in the contract. On LinkedIn Recruiter, Tier 1 to Tier 3 is 7.5× the sourcing allowance — 200 against 1,500 a month per license. A quote that does not name the tier is not a quote.
There are two unpublished numbers here, and a blended per-seat figure hides which one moved at renewal. Split them once and every future renewal is comparable.
Tier 1 is 200 sourced candidates a month, or 2,400 a year per license. The add-on line divided by that is your cost per candidate saved to a pipeline — the only unit that lets you compare this against a sourcing contractor.
Recruiter Lite publishes $170 a month and $1,680 a year per seat, and cannot buy Hiring Assistant at any price. So the entry point is a quoted Recruiter contract plus a quoted add-on, and nothing below that exists.
A Recruiter seat carries 150 InMail credits a month against Lite's 30, and Lite's published cost per credit is $5.67. Dividing the seat quote by 150 gives the same figure for the tier you are being sold.
The same method applied to the seat itself — the four numbers to bring, and the floor a quote sits above — is on Recruiter Corporate pricing, and the cost-per-credit ladder across every LinkedIn plan is on what an InMail costs. If you have not yet decided you need a Recruiter contract at all, start with Lite vs Corporate.
What an assistant outside LinkedIn does instead
Part of what Hiring Assistant does is work any general assistant will do on pasted text. The other part has no substitute, and the line between them is a platform rule rather than a capability gap.
A general assistant will read a job description and a batch of CVs you paste in, rank them against your criteria, and write the outreach.
It cannot source from LinkedIn, see who is Open to Work, send an InMail, or write anything into a Recruiter pipeline. LinkedIn blocks assistant crawlers outright, and its User Agreement bars scraping the site by any means including browser extensions — so the sourcing half of this product has no outside substitute.
An assistant will turn a job description into a Boolean string or a filter list you paste into Recruiter yourself.
The recruiting prompts in this site's toolkit are written against a 30-credit month rather than an unlimited one, which is the constraint every generic sourcing prompt ignores.
Sellers rather than recruiters get a different set of LinkedIn AI features, priced differently again — Account IQ, Lead IQ and Message Assist sit on Sales Navigator, where LinkedIn states in writing that an Advanced Plus subscription does not entitle a subscriber to its generative-AI features.
Getting a Hiring Assistant quote?
Tell us the seat count, the contract type and the credit tier you have been offered, and we will tell you what the tier is worth per candidate, what the seat line should look like beside it, and which of the two numbers to push on. Nothing to buy here.
- A reply within 4 business hours, from a person
- On the channel you pick — Telegram, WhatsApp, a call or email
- Nothing to buy: we publish LinkedIn's prices, not our own
The questions, answered without a made-up number
How much does LinkedIn Hiring Assistant cost?
LinkedIn discloses no price for it at any level — no list price, no per-credit price, no tier price. Its product page answers "How can I get Hiring Assistant?" with "Hiring Assistant is available for purchase as an add-on to LinkedIn Recruiter. To learn more, fill out the form to contact sales or reach out to your LinkedIn representative directly." The plan it attaches to publishes no list price either, so there are two unpublished numbers in the question. What is knowable: Recruiter Lite is $170 a month and $1,680 a year per seat, and Recruiter Lite cannot buy the add-on at all, so nothing about this product is reachable below a quoted Recruiter contract. Figures circulating in search results are attributed to public-sector procurement frameworks and reseller listings rather than to LinkedIn, and are not published here.
Which LinkedIn Recruiter plan do I need for AI features?
LinkedIn Recruiter, Recruiter Professional Services or RPS+. Not Recruiter Lite: LinkedIn's own four-tier comparison table marks Recruiter Lite as "AI features: No" and "Hiring Assistant: No". That is an unusually clean answer to the upgrade question and the opposite of what most upgrade guides imply — the $170 tier is not a cheap way into any of this, it is outside it entirely.
Does Recruiter Lite have AI?
No, and this is the one part of the question with a clean answer. LinkedIn's four-tier comparison table reads "AI features: No" and "Hiring Assistant: No" in the Recruiter Lite column, so none of the 7 Recruiter AI features on this page applies to it. What $170 a month buys is 30 InMail credits, 20+ recruiting filters, search limited to your own network. The AI layer starts one tier up, on a plan with no published price.
What is AI-assisted search in LinkedIn Recruiter?
You describe the candidate you want, or paste a job description, and Recruiter turns that into filters instead of you setting them. Boolean strings still work in the same box. There are two versions, and the difference matters: Advanced AI Search — pasting a job description or an example job link, plus the AI summary on a candidate card explaining the fit — is limited to LinkedIn Recruiter and RPS+ with the account language set to English, and RPS is excluded from it.
How many candidates can Hiring Assistant source per month?
Between 200 and 1,500 on LinkedIn Recruiter and between 150 and 1,500 on RPS+, depending on which of the three credit tiers your contract carries. The limits are per license and not pooled across users or contracts, and a sourcing credit is consumed only when a candidate passes evaluation and is saved to the pipeline. Applicant evaluation is a separate monthly pool, 3,500 to 25,000 on Recruiter.
Can Recruiter Professional Services buy Hiring Assistant?
LinkedIn answers this two ways. Its four-tier comparison table shows "Yes (add-on)" in the RPS column; the four dedicated Hiring Assistant help articles and the product page all carry the same eligibility box naming LinkedIn Recruiter and RPS+ only. This site publishes the Recruiter and RPS+ restriction, because four dedicated articles and the product page agree and the table is a summary of them. LinkedIn has not resolved the contradiction, so an RPS customer should get the answer from their representative in writing rather than rely on either page.
Is Hiring Assistant worth paying for?
Nobody can answer that without a price, and LinkedIn publishes none. What you can do before the call is fix the denominator: Tier 1 is 2,400 candidates saved to a pipeline per license per year, so the add-on line divided by that number is your cost per sourced candidate. Compare it against what a sourcing contractor charges per placed pipeline, not against the seat price — the seat is a separate purchase you are making anyway.
Are LinkedIn's 81% and 66% figures for Hiring Assistant independent?
No. All three of LinkedIn's published Hiring Assistant statistics — 81% fewer profiles reviewed, 66% higher InMail acceptance, 1.5 hours saved per role — carry the footnote "Based on LinkedIn data (January 2026)". They are LinkedIn measuring its own product on its own data, with no published methodology and no independent replication. They are worth knowing because a sales call will repeat them; they are not evidence.
Get the credit tier in writing before you get the price
LinkedIn publishes 6 Hiring Assistant credit tiers and no price for any of them. The tier is the only quantified thing in the contract, and $1,680 per seat per year on Recruiter Lite is the only Recruiter figure LinkedIn prints.