LinkedIn Recruiter has been the standard sourcing tool in professional hiring for more than fifteen years, and it remains the deepest single network for construction and design talent. Since 2023 a group of AI sourcing platforms has grown up around it, searching the wider public web, running searches in the background and drafting outreach on the recruiter's behalf. LinkedIn has answered with Hiring Assistant, its own agent. This paper sets out where these platforms sit in a talent acquisition stack, what each one is made of, and how six of them score on the same six measures.
From networks to visibility
For most of the last century a recruiter's value lay in a network: which contractor had just won a framework, who was running the site, which estimator was unsettled after a reorganisation. LinkedIn, launched in 2003, put careers online, and Recruiter followed in 2008 with search across the whole network. Today almost every professional in design and construction has some public presence, so knowing that a person exists is rarely the hard part. The work is in judging who is right for the role and whether they would move, and in reaching them first.
Where sourcing sits in the stack
The paper places sourcing alongside the ATS, CRM and HRIS that most in-house teams already run, and separates inbound applicants from outbound sourcing. A sourcing platform is made of three things, its data, its automated search and its outreach, and the useful question for most teams is what each one adds to the systems they already have.
Six platforms, six measures
LinkedIn Recruiter with Hiring Assistant, Recruiter Lite (for comparison), Juicebox, hireEZ, Noon and Metaview are each scored from 1 to 5 on price, UK construction reach, deliverability, integration, automation and GDPR compliance, with an unweighted average. Juicebox has the highest average, 4.7 out of 5. LinkedIn Recruiter matches it on UK construction reach and leads on compliance. Each platform then has a page of its own covering cost, where its data comes from, how it automates sourcing, how it reaches candidates and what it connects to.
What it costs
A LinkedIn Recruiter seat lists at £8,925 a year on LinkedIn's UK G-Cloud price list for one or two licences, with Hiring Assistant at about £2,000 on top. The AI platforms range from around £900 a seat a year at entry level upwards. Prices are list prices excluding VAT unless marked as reported, and US dollar prices are converted at $1 = £0.75.
Method
Prices, features and compliance positions come from each vendor's own pricing pages, documentation and privacy policies, the LinkedIn UK G-Cloud 14 price list, and third-party reports where marked. Scores reflect public opinion and Arcavia's own view for UK design and construction hiring in October 2026. Arcavia is a paying Juicebox customer, and the method note in the paper says so. No platform has yet published a UK construction case study, so a trial on a live role is still the best test.