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LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads are the two paid channels a recruitment business owner is most likely to consider, and the most common mistake is treating them as interchangeable. They are not. They do two different jobs. LinkedIn Ads sells identity: it lets you put your message in front of a defined type of hiring decision-maker, chosen by job title, seniority, company, and sector, before they start looking for a recruiter. Google Ads sells intent: it puts you in front of someone at the moment they search for what you do.
This post gives an honest take on both. It covers what each platform is genuinely good at, what they realistically cost, and the traps that drain a small budget on each. It is deliberately careful with the numbers. LinkedIn’s headline figures are ad reach and registered members, not active users, and Google publishes no comparable national user count at all, so any figure claiming one is invented. Reliable recruitment-specific cost data does not exist, so every benchmark here is directional and clearly flagged as such.
Above all, it makes the case that paid ads are an amplifier, not a foundation. They reward a clear niche, known numbers and fast follow-up, and they punish the absence of those things expensively. For many small recruitment companies, the cheaper next win is reconnecting with existing relationships, and this post permits you to start there. If you do advertise, it shows how to test small, choose the right platform for the job, and measure what actually matters: placements and gross profit, not clicks and form fills.
What You Will Learn in This Post
- The single idea that makes paid ads make sense: identity versus intent
- What LinkedIn Ads is genuinely good at, and the niches it suits best
- How to read LinkedIn’s audience numbers honestly, because ad reach is not active users
- What Google Search Ads is for, and the user-count myth to ignore
- The two mistakes that drain a small Google budget fastest
- Why neither platform rescues a weak offer, and the questions to ask first
- When the smarter money is on the people who already know you
- How to test paid ads without setting fire to your budget
- The only numbers worth measuring, and a simple way to work out what you can afford
The one idea: identity versus intent
If you remember one thing from this, make it this. LinkedIn Ads sells you identity. Google Ads sells you intent.
LinkedIn knows who people are: their job title, their seniority, the company they work for, its size and its sector. So you can put your message in front of a specific type of person, the exact hiring manager you want, before they have gone looking for a recruiter. You are buying the right audience.
Google knows what people want in the moment, because they have typed it into the search bar. Someone searching for a specialist recruiter in their sector is telling you what they need, right now. You are buying the right moment.
Audience before they search, or the moment when they search. Spend on one expecting it to behave like the other, and you will conclude that paid ads do not work for recruitment. They do. You have to know which job you are trying to do.
LinkedIn Ads: buying the right audience
LinkedIn is built for business. Every profile is a career history attached to a company, which is why it is the one paid channel where you can build an audience out of professional detail. You can target directors and heads of talent at engineering companies of fifty to two hundred people in a chosen region, and LinkedIn will show your ad to those people. No other paid channel does that as cleanly, and that’s why you use it.
The numbers
LinkedIn’s own advertising tools reported around 1.2 billion registered members globally in early 2025. In the UK, LinkedIn’s ad reach was 48 million people in late 2025, about 69 per cent of the population, and it grew by 5 million in a single year.
The important word is registered. These are member accounts, not active users, and the two are not the same. A widely cited third-party estimate puts active monthly LinkedIn use at around 350 million people worldwide. Still an enormous audience. Just not a billion people waiting to read your ad. When you plan a budget, plan against the realistic active audience that matches your target, not the headline account figure.
What it does well
- Reaches decision makers before they are actively searching, which nothing else does as well
- Promotes genuinely useful assets: a sector salary guide, a talent map, a short market report or a webinar
- Captures leads with native Lead Gen Forms that pre-fill work email, job title and company; LinkedIn recommends keeping these to three or four fields
- Puts budget behind a credible founder post, not just a company advert, which carries more weight in a trust-led sector
- Follows up with warm audiences who watched a video, visited the site or opened a report
Who it suits best
Professional services, technology, finance, engineering, and senior or leadership roles. White-collar niches where profiles are detailed, and you can describe your ideal client by company, function, and seniority. If that is your market, LinkedIn is the stronger paid platform for reaching clients.
The cost, honestly
LinkedIn is expensive, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The best cross-industry benchmark for this year, from a study of business-to-business advertisers published in August 2026, put the average cost per click at around 9 US dollars and the average cost per lead at around 202 US dollars. A separate vendor analysis of more than 1,300 campaigns put LinkedIn cost per click in the 8 to 16 US dollar range across the US, Canada, UK and DACH markets.
Read those as reference points only. They are global, cross-industry business-to-business figures in US dollars, not UK recruitment figures. Reliable recruitment-specific cost data doesn’t exist, so don’t convert these into a quote or forecast. Use them to set expectations, then build your own numbers from real campaigns.
Google Ads: buying the right moment
Google is a different animal. It is not one place, but a system that runs ads across search results, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and a lot of partner inventory. For a time-poor recruitment owner, ignore most of that and focus on one thing: Search. The ads that appear on the results page when someone types a query. Google’s strength is intent. Someone searching for executive search for finance directors needs you today, and you are answering them rather than interrupting them.
The reach is there. Google handled nearly 92 per cent of all UK searches across devices in August 2026. If your clients search for what you do, this is where they do it.
The user-count myth
You will often see a claim that Google has a certain number of users in your market, quoted as an advertising audience. Ignore it. Google does not publish a national user count for Google Ads the way LinkedIn publishes member figures, and the two cannot be compared like for like. The honest, defensible claim is about search share, which is very high, not about a made-up audience number.
What it does well
- Captures companies actively searching for a specialist supplier
- Protects your own company name so a competitor cannot buy an ad against it
- Runs tightly focused niche campaigns, for example, a contract recruiter for a named skill in a named city
- Remarkets to people who have already visited your site
The two traps that cost you money
First, candidates and clients overlap. Candidates and clients search for many of the same words. Bid broadly on recruitment, and you will pay for clicks from job seekers looking for work when you want employers looking to hire. The skill on Google is discipline: separate client searches from candidate searches, and use negative keywords to tell Google the words you never want to appear for, such as jobs, salary, CV template and free. Send every click to a page about that exact service, not to your homepage.
Second, premature automation. Google will steer you towards automated campaign types that spread your spend everywhere and let the system decide. They can work, but only once you are feeding Google accurate information about what a real result looks like. Google’s own guidance says its automated campaigns need enough budget to generate at least 50 conversions to learn properly, and a budget of at least ten times your target cost per result. For most small recruiters, early on, that is a lot of money spent teaching a machine. Start simple, stay in control, and hand over to automation only once you know what a good lead costs you.
A note on AI and search
Google said on its February 2026 earnings call that its AI answers at the top of search, AI Overviews and AI Mode, were driving more searching, including commercial searches, not less. Search is not going away. It is changing shape, so keep an eye on how it affects your query volumes and clicks over the coming year.
What neither platform can do
Neither LinkedIn Ads nor Google Ads will rescue a weak offer. Paid ads are an amplifier. If your proposition is sharp, your niche is clear, and you have proof, ads make more of that happen, faster. If your proposition is that you recruit across lots of sectors, your website looks tired, and there is no evidence you are any good, ads help you reach that conclusion quicker and more expensively.
Before you spend a penny, answer three honest questions:
- Have you actually chosen a niche you can speak to with authority, rather than a bit of everything?
- Do you know what a placement is worth to you in gross profit, and therefore what you can afford to spend to win one?
- Can you follow up on a lead the same day, every time, because paid leads go cold fast?
When to skip paid ads, for now
For many small recruitment companies, the honest answer to those questions is not yet, and that is fine. If your database is full of past clients you haven’t spoken to in a year, if your referrals are underused, or if you are barely posting anything, paid ads aren’t your cheapest next win. Reconnecting with people who already know you is. Ads are for pouring fuel on something already alight, not for lighting the fire. If you switched both platforms off today and put that money and time into your existing relationships instead, that would often be the better commercial decision.
How to test without wasting money
If the foundations are there, test carefully. Keep it small and narrow: one niche, one country, one clear offer and one good landing page. Do not test five things at once, or you will learn nothing. Then pick the platform that matches the job. If you can name the exact companies and people you want and they are not searching yet, that is LinkedIn. If people are already searching for your kind of service, that is Google. You do not need both to start. You need the right one.
The only numbers that matter
A lead is not a result. A click is not a result. A form fill is not a result. The numbers that matter run further down the line: how many leads became a real conversation, how many conversations became a brief, how many briefs became a placement, and what that placement was worth. If you judge your ads on clicks and cost per lead, you are measuring the easy thing rather than the thing that pays the bills. Remember, in recruitment, the placement often closes months after the ad, so track all the way through before you switch a campaign off.
A simple way to work out what you can afford: say a placement is worth 12,000 pounds in gross profit, you win one in five of your serious opportunities, and you are willing to spend 15 per cent of that profit to win the work. That points to roughly 360 pounds as the most you would pay for a qualified opportunity, and if around 40 per cent of raw leads become qualified, roughly 144 pounds as the most you would pay for a lead. Those figures are an illustration only, not a benchmark. Yours will be different. The point is that the maths starts from your profit, not from someone else’s number.
Thanks
Denise and Sharon
