Xing vs LinkedIn. What’s better for recruiting?
If you’ve come across Xing, it’s likely that you live in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Some call Xing the German equivalent of LinkedIn, but we feel this is a slightly over-ambitious description. Whilst the business has enjoyed impressive growth, it only has 2% of the market share of LinkedIn. For many Germans Xing is the dominant business platform, but if you’re not in Germany why should you care?
If you’re wondering what we’re even talking about, fear not, as we’re here to fill you in on what Xing is, and set the record straight on Xing vs LinkedIn. We’ll reveal how the two platforms compare, uncovering some surprising benefits.
What is Xing?
While some cite Xing as a social networking site, if you visit the website, Xing sits firmly in the recruiting space. The main hero section of Xing’s home page broadcasts the message: ’Find the right job for you.’
And it’s here that we find our first difference between the two platforms. Whilst admittedly LinkedIn began as a platform for job searchers, it has since evolved into a B2B social networking platform; a place where not only recruiters, but professionals across all walks of business can engage with each other and interact.
Whether your goal is to find a job, create brand awareness, share information, or something entirely different, LinkedIn offers a huge marketplace of over 1 billion work professionals to network and engage with online.
About Xing
Xing was founded by Lars Hinrichs from Hamburg, Germany in 2003. The company went public in 2006 and in 2019 Xing became a brand name under the New Work company. In 2022 Xing reached a turnover of €313 million, although their revenue was reduced to €305 million in 2023. Whether this is a downward turn or a short-term reduction remains to be seen.
Xing is a place where professionals in the DACH region can find jobs, and businesses can source talent. Xing also offers its own Applicant Tracking Software called onlyfy Application Manager. It delivers a comprehensive and popular solution to recruiting if you are within its target region.
Xing marketplace
With over 21 million members and 20,000+ companies, XING is one of the leading job networks in Europe. It caters for German-speaking recruiters and candidates across the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). Its 21 million members however still only make up a fraction of LinkedIn’s network.
LinkedIn marketplace
In contrast, LinkedIn broke the 1 billion user mark in 2024, serving a global marketplace of over 200 countries and territories worldwide. Having launched only 3 years before Xing in 2003, LinkedIn has conquered the market, evolving into the world’s most popular B2B social networking platform.
When it comes to revenue, LinkedIn succeeded in growing its revenue in 2023, which now sits at an impressive $16.3 billion.
Usage comparison
But it’s not all about the number of users on a platform and revenue. Usage is also a good measure of how engaged an audience is. Rouette Executive Search found that 86% of people use LinkedIn daily compared to just 14% on Xing. They found candidates were faster to respond to job communication on LinkedIn as a result. This makes LinkedIn a more successful platform for candidate recruitment.
Xing for recruiters
If you’re a recruiter, Xing used to offer job postings via a service called onlyfy.
We find product branding amongst the Xing group of companies rather confusing, as onlyfy is in the process of bringing these products back to Xing.
Xing’s recruiting products consist of:
Xing job advertisements
A service for posting job adverts, a single Xing job advertisement costs between €539 and €1,399 per advert.
Xing Talent Manager
A solution for proactively sourcing candidates, Xing Talent Manager packages can be compared to LinkedIn Premium Plans. Key areas to note are that with Talent Manager Core at €366/month you can send 200 messages to non-1st-degree connections each month, compared to 150 each month with LinkedIn Recruiter Professional, costing €835/month.
If sending messages to non-connections is important then the Xing Per package offers unlimited messages (Xing’s equivalent of InMails).
Xing Talent Service
A really nice service from Xing is their recruitment service called Xing Talent Service. They can supply you with suitable or pre-screened candidates, taking a lot of your recruitment efforts and stress away. If you don’t have the resources of an internal HR department this could be of great value to you, with prices ranging up to €12,990 for 8 pre-screened candidates within 12 weeks.
LinkedIn for recruiters
LinkedIn is the go-to platform for recruiters across the globe thanks to its huge, active network of professionals who will gain instant visibility of your job advert.
LinkedIn allows any recruiter, in any company, to post a job vacancy. The job is visible to everyone on the platform under the job marketplace.
If you head into the ‘jobs’ menu on the main header, you’ll notice that LinkedIn automatically selects top jobs that fit your profile and your skillset.
It is intuitive and user-friendly, with a super cool 'Easy Apply' feature. Interested candidates can apply at the click of a button via a deep link that sends them to a specific location within the app. It’s a neat feature for candidates, with your LinkedIn profile also acting as your CV. And why not? All of your experience, skillsets, history, and references are already there.
And the best thing for recruiters? You can post jobs for free using Limited Listings (rather than ‘paid for’ Premium listings).
LinkedIn Limited Listings
You can have 1 free job post live at any time with LinkedIn Limited Listings. LinkedIn will ask you to specify certain criteria to segment the audience who will see the job posting, such as geographic location, industry, experience level, and skillsets, among others.
Although your job post won’t be visible to everyone, it targets the advert to who you want to see it, which, in our eyes, can only be a good thing.
So if you’re on a limited recruiting budget, or trying LinkedIn for recruitment for the first time, a free job post on Limited Listings is a great way to go.
Keep in mind though that if someone runs a search from the search bar and filters by ‘job’, your advert could appear as far down as page 16 after all of the promoted jobs ads, as seen in the example here.
If you really want to get your job ads higher up the list, and seen by more people, then you may want to pay to promote your LinkedIn ads via a Premium Job Posting
LinkedIn Premium Job Postings
These offer greater visibility across LinkedIn, appearing at the top of the job search results and being distributed across the platform via targeted recommendations in the LinkedIn feed, Jobs tab, and also Notifications. Premium postings receive 3 x the number of applicants than free postings according to LinkedIn.
Also, by promoting LinkedIn Premium Job Postings in the LinkedIn Feed, they reach both active and passive relevant job seekers.
LinkedIn Talent Solutions
LinkedIn offers a Recruiter Lite and a Recruiter Professional plan, which allows you to use its platform for candidate sourcing. Combined with its job posting solution, LinkedIn offers Talent Solutions packages for businesses looking to hire the best candidates for their company.
You can compare the features of LinkedIn’s Recruiter packages in our LinkedIn Premium Plans comparison guide. Some recruiters use Sales Navigator for their candidate outreach, which we also compare in this guide.
LinkedIn Career Pages
LinkedIn Career Pages offers recruiters the ability to build your brand, giving you a space to share your company vision, mission statement, ethos, videos, career opportunities, job vacancies, and a lot more.
By giving potential candidates a rich source of company information, the familiarity of your brand makes professionals 1.8x more likely to apply for a job.
LinkedIn provides plenty of help on building your brand culture with Career Pages.
So we’ve delved into the products offered by LinkedIn and Xing for recruiters. Now let’s look at what we feel are their top features and weaknesses.
Xing top features
- Cultural matching. Xing goes beyond matching candidate skillsets to roles posted by recruiters looking to source new talent. It also looks at the ethical and cultural fit of that candidate to the business, helping recruiters to find the right long-term fit for their company
- A more targeted talent pool. Because of its limited marketplace of German-speaking countries, Xing provides recruiters with a more concentrated talent pool of individuals. It can allow you to reach the right potential candidates faster. And because Xing is solely for recruitment, you know that users on the platform are, or have been actively engaged in the job-seeking market
- Awareness. Xing alerts users of new job positions that open up, reaching the passive audience on the network. LinkedIn also offers new job alerts, but this tends to be only if someone has recently carried out a job search on the platform
- More outreach capacity. For proactive recruiters actively looking for candidates to fill a specific role, Xing offers more messages to non-connections than LinkedIn
- Xing’s Talent Service. Having qualified, suitable candidates delivered straight to your door allows you to hire faster and maintain your focus on core business activities
Xing limitations
- Geographical presence. If you are a global company, Xing won’t allow you to search for candidates across the globe. Recruiters can only source candidates from German-speaking countries on Xing, so may require the use of additional platforms or job sites for multinational recruiting. Think also of more modern remote working roles - Xing doesn’t allow recruiters to easily reach out to these candidates
- Language limitations. As Xing serves a German-speaking market, all outreach and job postings will need to be carried out by a native speaker to get the best result
- Data gathering limitations. With Xing, there is no search filter to allow recruiters to build a talent pool for proactive outreach and engagement
LinkedIn top features
- Global capability. For multinational companies, LinkedIn offers a single, central platform to source candidates from across the globe. This makes business recruitment strategies unified allowing centralized HR departments to ensure brand and cultural consistency even when it comes to job adverts
- Candidate search capabilities. If you have a LinkedIn Premium Plan, you get access to the platform’s advanced search filters. This is one of LinkedIn’s greatest features, allowing you to pull up a list of candidates that exactly matches a tight search criteria. With over 40 filters (if you have a Sales Nav and LinkedIn Recruiter Professional plan), it’s second to none, and a powerful tool to save recruiters time. In fact, recruiters can save up to 75% of their time by using LinkedIn premium search with automation tools
- With LinkedIn you can create candidate lists, which you can revisit for easy candidate management
- We love LinkedIn’s free job posting service, making recruiting accessible to everyone
- The ability to use automation tools like Dux-Soup helps recruiters to save time, save cost and scale their activity, ultimately finding candidates faster
- Being such a popular and well-adopted platform means that your messages are more likely to be seen, and responded to
LinkedIn limitations
- Cost. LinkedIn can get costly when you factor in a LinkedIn Recruiter Professional plan with multiple job postings
- Increasing/changing limitations. LinkedIn regularly changes its limits. Whether this is characters in their messages, number of connection invitations they allow or otherwise. With no certainty over future limits, functionality can reduce at any time
- LinkedIn doesn’t offer as many InMails as Xing does to message non-connections. This means that with LinkedIn you can often be tied to sending a connection message before you can engage with someone. Although there are ways to automate your connection invitations, and acceptance rates can be as high as 80%, this can slow down the recruitment process
Summary
If you’re wondering which recruitment platform to invest in, this will largely depend on your individual situation and hiring requirements. There are also many other tools used by recruiters that need to be weighed up in the tech stack mix, and these may need to work together. Here are some scenarios to consider:
- If you/your candidates are not in the DACH region then LinkedIn should be your go-to platform
- Do you proactively hunt for and source the best candidates with an outreach campaign? If so, Xing Per, with unlimited monthly messages to non-connections is an attractive option
- If resources are tight and you want to be provided with qualified candidates who are willing to change jobs, consider Xing’s Talent Service Pro
- If you just want to post a job and wait for interested applicants, we recommend LinkedIn due to its more engaged audience. You’re likely to reach a wider pool of candidates, and if your brand is strong in the marketplace, receive a lot of strong applications
- By automating your recruitment process, you can save 75% of your time. Free to try, it’s worth seeing if it can work for you and reduce costs at the same time
What we’ve seen here is that LinkedIn offers a wider reach, and also better engagement of the 2 platforms. However, within the DACH region, Xing can be more affordable and more targeted for businesses that recruit often. One must keep in mind though that with revenues declining in 2023, what is the future for the challenger platform?
