One string to boole them all
Boolean and other search operators for recruiters: search for title, in sites, urls, pdf, other files and more.
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Boolean logic and search operators
When English mathematician George Boole invented Boolean logic in 1847, he might not have guessed that recruiters all over the world would be using his logic today to find candidates.
Recruiters use the Boolean operators AND, OR?and NOT?(-) before or in between keywords so they can specify their search strings and find the people they want.
Boolean logic works in most search engines, whether it’s Google, Yandex or Bing, or platforms like LinkedIn and GitHub.
For most search engines a lot of advanced operators work to specify the search in addition to the Boolean operators
Each operator has its own function.
The power of search operators is demonstrated with the following example:
When you search for the following search string in Google for candidates you don’t really get the desired results, take a look;
What you get is a bunch of job boards, not what we're looking for!
But if you add some nice little operators the search looks like this;
In this search we only get LinkedIn profiles as results with people who have sales representative in their job title.
That’s more like it.
In this guide we’ll go through which operators there are, what they mean and how you can use them.
Basic operators
Some of the most frequently used operators are AND, OR and NOT. But also brackets ( ) and quotations “ ” are really helpful in targeting and structuring your search. The site: operator is one of the most useful operators to begin your search with if you are searching for profile results from specific platforms or websites.
Site:
Tells the search engine to look for results in a particular site. You can use this operator to look for candidates on websites and niche platforms where you know your target group is. You can use the domain name of a website (like linkedin.com) or more specific urls (like linkedin.com/in). You don’t have to include?www.?Or?https://
Example 1
You want to find LinkedIn profiles only.
Example 2
You want to search niche platforms like Stack Overflow where you know your candidates have profiles and are active.
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AND
Tells the search engine to look for keyword X AND keyword Y. Most search engines handle a space like AND, so you can choose to use a space between keywords instead of AND.
Example 1
You’re looking for an engineer that has as well Angular as Node.js in their profiles, so you use the AND operator (or a space) between those keywords.
Example 2
You’re looking for a sales candidate that speaks Mandarin and lives in Amsterdam, so you use the AND operator (or a space) between those keywords.
OR
Tells the search engine to look for keyword X OR keyword Y. By adding OR operators you usually broaden your search because you allow more variations of keywords.
Example 1
You’re looking for an engineer that has either Angular or Typescript in their profiles because you assume some engineers will mention only either one of those.?
Example 2
You want to search for talent that has worked for leading tech companies. You want to look for talent that has worked for either Google, Microsoft or Amazon.
NOT (-)
Tells the search engine to exclude keywords, phrases or domains. In the case of Google the - is used in front of the keyword. In some other search engines NOT is used in front of the keyword.
Example 1
You’re looking for experienced professionals and not for interns, you exclude words like “Intern”, “Trainee” and “Summer Analyst”.
Example 2
You’re looking for an engineer who is not focussed on leading a team but on coding, you exclude team lead profiles by putting the '-' in front of keywords and phrases like “Team lead”.
Quotations “ ”
Tells the search engine to search for an exact phrase. Keywords within the quotation marks should be occurring exactly as they are spelled and in the same order...
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1 年Yuma, thanks for sharing!