Boolean Search: A Simple Guide For Recruiters and Sourcers

So, you’re a recruiter or sourcer and you want to get better at finding candidates that your clients will love and that will make you placements. Well, you’ve come to the right place. You’ll learn how to do just that in this guide on Boolean searches.

First thing’s first. What’s a Boolean search?

Well, in a nutshell, a Boolean search is an advanced type of online search that’s used to narrow down your results to a very specific list of criteria. Technically, Boolean searches can be used for lots of things besides recruiting. However, for what we do, we’re going to use them to find candidates. And not just any candidates, the exact candidates we’re looking for.

Sweet. Where can I use them?

The beauty of Boolean searches is that they are versatile and can be used on almost any online platform. You can use them on:

• Online search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AltaVista (just kidding)
• Social media sites. You’ll likely use them most on LinkedIn, but can also take advantage of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on.
• Resume Databases. Websites like Indeed, Monster, and Careerbuilder aren’t just job boards. They house massive databases of resumes that can be accessed, for a price.
• Your ATS, or Applicant Tracking System. Over time, your agency has interviewed thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of candidates. Eventually, some will fall through the cracks. You can effectively find them again using Boolean searches.

The bottom line is this: If there’s a database, you can use Boolean searches to quickly and effectively find the exact candidates you are looking for.

You’ve sold me. How do I do it?

You perform Boolean searches by combining “keywords”, what you want to search for, with Boolean operators. You can further refine those results by using Boolean modifiers. And if that’s not QUITE enough, you can get even more specific by using advanced searches.

What’s a keyword?

The keyword is the core thing you’re looking for. It’s what’s most important to you. This can include the title of the person that you’re looking for, their geographic location, a specific software, an industry, an employer, whatever else you want. Ultimately, the keyword that you’re looking for is going to be determined by what your client has told you that they are looking for. Let’s say, for a basic search, you’re looking for a Chief Financial Officer, located in New York, and that comes from a SaaS, or Software As A Service, company. Your keywords, in this case, would be “Chief Financial Officer”, “New York”, and “SaaS”.

Well, there’s a few more we can could use, but we’ll cover that in a minute. First, let’s take a look at what kind of results we get if we put some basic keywords into Google.

Swing and a miss. We’re not getting anything that we’re looking for. Let’s dive into operators and narrow those results down to find what we’re looking for. We’ll go through each operator and modifier, and then create an updated Boolean search at the end using what we’ve learned.

ONE THING TO NOTE: All of the following operators MUST be typed in as uppercase. Otherwise, the system will not recognize it as a Boolean search.

1.The AND operator

The AND Operator will NARROW your results. If you type in two keywords and connect them with an AND operator, the only results that will show are results that have both keywords in them. This can also be written as an ampersand (&).

In other words, we’re looking for a Chief Financial Officer AND he/she has to live in New York AND he/she have a SaaS background.

We’ll incorporate these as separate keywords in our new search.

2. The OR operator

The OR operator will WIDEN your results. If you type in two keywords and connect them with the OR operator, results that have either keyword will show. This can also be written as a vertical bar (|).

A Chief Financial Officer can also be called a CFO. New York can also be abbreviated as NY. SaaS can also be spelled out as “Software as a Service”. Therefore, we should incorporate an OR operator to ensure all of those possibilities are captured.

3. The NOT operator

The NOT operator will NARROW your results. If you type in two keywords with a NOT in between them, results that contain the second keyword will be excluded. This can also be written as a dash (-).

When we’re typing this search on Google, we want to get results for people, not job postings for CFOs in New York. Therefore, we’re going to use the NOT operator to exclude results like “jobs”, “hiring” and “opening”. This will remove a lot of the previous issues we saw in our first screenshot.

That’s all of the Boolean operators. Still with me?

We’ve gotten the meat and potatoes of the search down. However, in order for the search to be properly executed, we have to add modifiers. So, what are the modifiers?

1. Quotation Marks, or Quotes “”

Quotes are used to NARROW search results and specify an exact phrase that consists of more than one word.

Chief Financial Officer, New York, and Software as a Service are all made up of more than one word. Since we only want to see results that contain those exact phrases, we are going to put them in quotes in our updated Boolean search.

2. Parentheses ()

Parentheses are used to enclose phrases, most commonly the OR operator, and will NARROW search results. It helps our search engine understand which keywords we are specifying.

Since an acceptable result could say Chief Financial Officer or CFO, that portion of the string will be (“Chief Financial Officer” OR CFO)

3. Asterisk *

The asterisk is used at the base of a root word and will include all permutations of that root word. This can NARROW OR WIDEN search results depending on which type of operator it is used to modify.

For example, if we want to avoid job openings in our results and say NOT job*, our search will exclude results that have both “job” and “jobs”.

Now then, let’s take what we’ve learned and try that Boolean search again. We’re going to combine the keywords that are important to us with the AND operator, make sure we get all relevant results with the OR operator, exclude irrelevant results with the NOT operator, and use modifiers to tie everything together.

Our new search will be (“Chief Financial Officer” OR CFO) AND (“New York” OR NY) AND (SaaS OR “Software as a Service”) -job* -hiring -opening -hiring -careers

Let’s see what we get.

BOOM. Look at how much we were able to narrow down our search results just by applying some Boolean logic, and each of the results contains the name of a person that could potentially be a fit.

For some searches, this will be all you need. However, if you want to get really granular, we can keep going.

Advanced Tricks

1. Search a specific site.

Let’s say we only want to find LinkedIn profiles of candidates that match this criteria. We can isolate our results to a specific website by using the term “site:” (you don’t need the quotes) BEFORE the Boolean logic. So, if we were to search LinkedIn, our search would be:

site:linkedin.com (“Chief Financial Officer” OR CFO) AND (“New York” OR NY) AND (SaaS OR “Software as a Service”) -job* -hiring -opening -hiring -careers

2. Search for file results

Maybe our perfect CFO has his or her resume floating around somewhere online just waiting for us to find in PDF or Word format. A recruiter can dream, right?

In this case, we can use the filetype syntax to only show results that are in a specific file format. If we want to find resumes posted online that match our criteria and are in either a Word or PDF format, we could type:

(filetype:pdf OR filetype:docx) (“Chief Financial Officer” OR CFO) AND (“New York” OR NY) AND (SaaS OR “Software as a Service”) -job* -hiring -opening -hiring -careers

3. Search web page text

If you only want to find results for web pages that have your keywords on the text portion of the page, you can use text search syntax. For example, maybe our perfect CFO has a personal website that states “I’m the CFO of Leaf, a New York based SaaS company.” To find this, we could type:

Intext: (“Chief Financial Officer” OR CFO) AND (“New York” OR NY) AND (SaaS OR “Software as a Service”) -job* -hiring -opening -hiring -careers

So, there you have it, everything you, as a recruiter or sourcer, need to know in order to create super effective Boolean searches.

Cool, so I have everything I need to be a great recruiter?

Well… no. While complex searches might be something a lot of people think of when they think of recruiting, there’s a hell of a lot more to being a recruiter than knowing how to query the internet. Vault Academy’s Full Desk Recruiter program has 1 lesson out of over 150 dedicated to Boolean searches. There’s so much more to learn.

Originally posted on the Vault Academy blog.