LinkedIn changed how it charges for recruiting ads. If you are running a campaign this summer, the change has already happened to your account. Here is what the new model costs, how it behaves differently from what it replaced, and the one setting you should check today.
Summary
If you logged into your account sometime after July 31 and noticed your LinkedIn campaign looked different, you were not imagining it. New price, new budget structure, and possibly a request to connect your LinkedIn Company Page. Nothing about your account broke. LinkedIn simply changed the rules of the game, and everybody running a LinkedIn campaign got moved to the new version at the same time.
Here is the plain version of what happened and what it costs. More importantly we give you ideas about what you should do about it.
For years, LinkedIn sold recruiting ads through slot campaigns. You bought a Daily campaign or a 30-Day campaign, your job sat in a slot for a set period, and you paid for that airtime whether or not a single person did anything with it. It was simple to budget for and easy to explain to a CFO.
Those are gone. LinkedIn replaced them with a Pay-for-Performance model, usually shortened to P4P. Instead of buying time, you are buying engagement.
This decision came from LinkedIn, not from your ATS provider. Every client running a Daily or 30-Day campaign was affected, so if it feels like something happened to you specifically, it did not. It happened to everyone.
P4P uses fixed budget tiers. You pick one of three:
That budget only gets drawn down when a candidate clicks Apply on your job. Views are free. Scrolling past your post is free. Someone reading your job description for four minutes and deciding against it is free. You pay when a person takes the action you actually want.
The campaign runs until the budget is fully spent or 30 days pass, whichever comes first. That second part is the piece people miss. Under the old 30-Day campaign, you were guaranteed a full month of visibility. Under P4P, a job that performs well can burn through its budget in twelve days and end early. That is not a malfunction. That is the model working exactly as designed.
There is one more detail worth knowing. LinkedIn's Express Apply is not part of P4P. When candidates click Apply, they land on your career page to finish the application rather than filling out a form inside LinkedIn. Some recruiters love that because it filters for intent. Others miss the volume. Either way, plan for it.
Unspent budget expires. It does not roll over, it does not convert to a credit, and it does not follow you into a renewal. If your campaign ends with $25 left and renews at the $299 tier, the new campaign starts at $299, not $274. Refunds are not available on unused budget, and that applied to the retired Daily and 30-Day campaigns too.
This also affects when you can change tiers. If you were migrated to a budget level that does not fit your hiring volume, ending the campaign early triggers the use-it-or-lose-it clause and you forfeit the remainder. The better move is to wait out the 30 days and adjust at renewal.
If you had a Daily campaign set to auto-renew, it moved to the $549 tier and was charged on July 31. That number tends to raise eyebrows, but it is roughly $30 less than a full month of Daily typically cost.
If you had a 30-Day campaign, it moved to the $399 tier. Same price as before, so no change to your line item. The difference is behavioral rather than financial: your campaign is no longer promised the full month.
If you canceled before July 31, nothing migrated. You are starting fresh whenever you decide to advertise again.
For context, LinkedIn's self-serve promoted jobs run on an auction. You set a daily or total budget, minimums land somewhere around $7 to $10 per day, and clicks generally cost between $1.50 and $4.50 in the U.S. depending on the role and the market. Third-party analyses put the average cost per applicant near $2.83. At the enterprise end, Job Slots run roughly $200 to $1,000 per slot per month on annual contracts.
Compared with all that, fixed P4P tiers are refreshingly boring. You know the ceiling before you start. There is no bid to manage, no daily spend to babysit, and no surprise invoice because a job title turned out to be competitive.
Here is the genuinely good news buried in this change. LinkedIn Limited, the free organic posting option, used to require adding it from the shopping cart for every single job. That extra step is gone.
Now, as long as your LinkedIn Company Page is connected under Company Information, your jobs are automatically eligible to post to LinkedIn's free job board. No per-job clicking. No remembering.
You need a verified LinkedIn Company Page URL to make any of this work, paid or free. LinkedIn wants to confirm your company is real before it lets your jobs through the door.
This is the part that separates a frustrating month from a quiet one. HiringThing handles LinkedIn as a setting, not a chore, and its applicant tracking platform pushes your jobs out to LinkedIn alongside the rest of its job board distribution without you touching each posting.
Connecting takes about thirty seconds:
You will need the Manage Account Details permission, so if you do not see the page, ask your admin. If your account already had an active LinkedIn campaign, the field may already be filled in, because HiringThing pre-populated it to smooth the transition. Double-check it anyway, since that URL determines where every future job posts.
Running multiple sites under one account? Each site can point to its own LinkedIn Company Page through Site Management, so a franchise or a multi-brand operation is not stuck posting everything under the parent company name.
Opting out is just as easy. Remove the URL to stop all LinkedIn posting, or add #LI-DNI to a specific job description and LinkedIn will skip that one.
And because P4P budgets are finite, you can track spend from the Download section of your account to see how much is left. The data can be up to four hours behind, so treat it as recent rather than live.
Then let the free organic posting do its quiet work in the background while you focus on the candidates who show up.
The pricing changed. The work of hiring did not. With the connection set up once, the rest of it mostly takes care of itself.
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