Comparing LinkedIn vs. Glassdoor for Employers Seeking Workers

With millions of unfilled job openings and a serious shortage of workers, businesses across the country are struggling to recruit the employees they need.

Is your business struggling to find qualified job candidates? In that case, you’ve no doubt considered using a popular online recruitment platform like LinkedIn or Glassdoor. But what’s the difference between the two? Which one is best for your needs?

Another website that addresses many of the options on both sides, in one location, is ZipRecruiter. If neither LinkedIn nor Glassdoor has everything job seekers or employers need, it may be a better choice to find qualified candidates or land your next role. Read on to understand which job board will help you achieve your professional goals. 

In this guide, we’ll go in-depth and do a side-by-side comparison between these two platforms — how they work, what they cost and what audiences they’re aimed at.

Let’s start with an overview of each:

LinkedIn: the Ultimate Networking Site

LinkedIn is the biggest professional networking site in the world, with more than 750 million members in 200 countries.

LinkedIn for Employers

LinkedIn can help employers connect with qualified candidates, especially for white-collar positions. Those professionals are the ones who mostly use the networking site. 

You can pay to use “LinkedIn Recruiter,” which is typically used by larger companies; or “LinkedIn Recruiter Lite,” which is for smaller companies. With LinkedIn Recruiter, you can create an unlimited number of job postings.

You can create a job posting for free using a service called LinkedIn Jobs, but know that LinkedIn uses a pay per click model to promote your job vacancies. 

LinkedIn for Job Seekers

Once you create an account on this networking platform, you build a profile and link yourself to other professionals you’ve worked with or who you know. Networking is a good way to look for a job, and LinkedIn says roughly half of hires on the site result from a personal connection.

Looking for a job posting? You can look on the LinkedIn Jobs page to get recommendations for job listings that might appeal to you. Whether you’re a software engineer or an accountant or something completely different, there’s something here for you.

LinkedIn is free for job seekers, although LinkedIn Premium costs $29.99 to $59.99 per month for job seekers. With those plans, you get more tools to help your profile stand out, you get the ability to message LinkedIn members you’re not connected to, and you get more information on the people who are viewing your professional profile.

Glassdoor: Employees Rate Employers

Glassdoor launched in 2008 as a company review website where employees and former employees could write reviews of their company anonymously, and post their salaries for comparison. It has since expanded its offerings, and now attracts roughly 50 million visitors per month.

Glassdoor for Employers

You can claim your company on Glassdoor’s website and create a company profile for free. It’s a good way to build your employer brand. The free version allows you to post basic information about your company and what it does. Glassdoor’s paid plans offer more customization options.

For job listings, Glassdoor sends you to its sister website, Indeed.com, one of the biggest online job boards around for employers and job hunters alike. You can post up to 10 jobs free for seven days. Beyond that, though, you’ll need to pay.

Indeed’s hiring platform helps employers tap into that job board to find qualified candidates who are available. Recruiters can expedite the screening process, automatically moving candidates forward who indicate they meet preset conditions in hiring questionnaires.

Like ZipRecruiter, Indeed lets you pay to bump up the placement of your job posting in search results, and you can create targeted ads to advertise to more qualified candidates.

Glassdoor for Job Seekers 

Glassdoor is free for job seekers, and the company profiles are useful in your job search. Are you interested in a particular company? You can read employee reviews of each company, and guess what? Not all the reviews are positive! In fact, some of the reviews tend to be scathing. Reading them can be quite educational. Learn whether certain companies believe in work-life balance and things like that.

LinkedIn vs. Glassdoor: Pros and Cons 

Each of these popular recruitment platforms have their pluses and minuses, depending on what you’re looking for. 

LinkedIn’s Pros and Cons

LinkedIn is huge and offers many options.

Pros 

• Offers a vast networking platform
• Offers a manageable pay per click model to promote job listings

Cons 

• Can be confusing whether to sign up for LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, LinkedIn Premium or LinkedIn Jobs
• Not all prices are posted online

Glassdoor’s Pros and Cons

Perhaps the trickiest part of Glassdoor is finding its prices.

Pros 

• Offers some basic job listings for free
• You can create a company profile with information you want prospective recruits to see

Cons 

• The actual job listings are on a different site, Indeed
• Prices aren’t posted online

LinkedIn vs. Glassdoor: Applicant Tracking 

Does your company use an applicant tracking system like Bullhorn, ClearCompany or Greenhouse? Both LinkedIn and Glassdoor work seamlessly with dozens of third-party applicant tracking systems.

Using ATS integration, these online platforms can help ensure that your job posts are up-to-date, eliminating friction for job applicants and making the interview process more efficient.

Both LinkedIn and Glassdoor’s ATS integration can also generate valuable data for employers, from monitoring job posting quality to helping you tap into a resume database. The analytics can show you how well candidates respond to your job alerts or job ads and help you uncover ways to improve them. 

LinkedIn vs. Glassdoor: What It Costs 

This is the most challenging part for job posters like you to grapple with, because there are so many different pricing options, and not all the prices are posted online. In some cases, you’ll need to ask each company’s sales department for a quote.

Free options are few. Both recruiting platforms offer free trials: ZipRecruiter lets you post jobs for free for four days. LinkedIn offers a one-month free trial for its “Recruiter Lite” option. Glassdoor lets you post up to 10 job openings for free for seven days.

LinkedIn’s Pricing

On LinkedIn, you can post one job at a time for free. Free job posts appear in search results on LinkedIn, and they allow you to filter and manage job applicants. But they become less visible in search results over time to give newer job postings the opportunity to be seen by job seekers. Once your job posting gets 75 applicants, it gets removed from search results.

You have to reach out to LinkedIn to get a price quote for LinkedIn Recruiter, which is typically used by larger companies, and which allows you to create an unlimited number of job postings. However, a slimmed-down version called LinkedIn Recruiter Lite costs $119 per month, or $99.95 per month if you sign up for a year.

LinkedIn also has a service called LinkedIn Jobs, where you can post a job for free and then pay per click to promote it.

Glassdoor’s Pricing

Through Glassdoor, you can post up to 10 jobs for free for seven days on its sister site, Indeed. Beyond that, though, you’ll need to pay for premium job placements.

Glassdoor has two paid plans — Standard and Select. For prices, you have to contact Glassdoor’s sales department.

With the Standard package, you can customize your company profile and do a keyword analysis of your company’s reviews, among other things. With the Select package, you get industry benchmark reports and audience targeting insights.

Customer Support 

You can contact LinkedIn via live chat support, but not on the phone. The website has a help center where you find “how to” guides or submit a query.

Glassdoor has a “Contact Us” page on its website where you can send the company queries. There’s also a search bar that can help you find answers to your questions.

Resume Search 

Want to do a resume search? LinkedIn doesn’t have a huge resume database like, say, ZipRecruiter does. But on LinkedIn, you can use the site’s search tools to look through users’ profiles and find potential job candidates.

Glassdoor’s sister site, Indeed, also offers screening solutions to expedite the hiring process, without letting an unqualified candidate smooth-talk you into an interview. 

The Bottom Line 

If you’re an employer looking for an effective place to post jobs, these are two solid options.

LinkedIn allows you to contact potential candidates who fit your needs, so you can encourage them to apply. It also allows you access to a vast network of professionals.

Glassdoor allows you to create a detailed company profile and assert some control over your brand. It also allows you to post jobs through its sister site, Indeed.

However, ZipRecruiter offers you the ability to get your job posting out to more than 100 job sites. Also, hiring managers and HR directors can take advantage of how ZipRecruiter’s AI streamlines the process of creating job postings, reaching qualified talent and tracking candidates. 

Any of these choices can find you the employees you need.

Mike Brassfield ([email protected]) is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder.