Boolean Search for Recruiter's.....

This is a great simplifier for many, but Boolean search writing is a skill that top recruiters need to know directly in order to get meaningful candidate search results from a wide range of software.

Beyond Google, many other systems we use on a daily basis accept Boolean searches. This includes LinkedIn, Monster, and quite probably your internal ATS. SearchOnTheGo won’t help you with these platforms, so if you want to get the most from them you need to know the basics of Boolean searching directly. Therefore, in less than 1,000 words, let’s see if I can explain how to do it!

Fully constructed Boolean search strings can look both confusing and complex, but don’t worry, because they aren’t! The first important thing to appreciate is that there are only five elements of syntax to understand. These are:

AND

OR

NOT

()

“”

By applying these appropriately, along with the keywords you wish to consider, you can create a huge range of search operations. There is no limit to how often you can use any of these elements in a search, so you can create very specific search strings, which will save you a lot of time in filtering the results.

AND

AND is the simplest function to apply. Any search terms that follow an AND command must appear in the result. For example:

engineer AND “senior developer”

will give results that include both the word engineer and the phrase “senior developer”. All search results will include both, and any CVs that have either engineer or “senior developer” (but not both) will not appear.

OR

OR provides options into a search. Usage of the OR command allows you to create a list of possibilities for which only one match is important. For example, the following search phrase would give you results that contain one or more of the stated words:

hospitality OR catering OR hotelier

NOT

NOT is the command of exclusion. If there are closely related terms that mean very different things, then usage of the NOT command is extremely valuable. An example could be as follows:

architect NOT “software architect”

This would give you results that contain the word architect, but leaving out any that use the phrase “software architects”. Very useful if you are operating in the construction industry.

The one major limitation with the NOT command is that it isn’t recognized by Google.

“” – Quotation Marks

You will have noticed that I have used the “” expression above in some examples already, wrapped around particular keywords. These quotation marks are used to capture a phrase that is to be kept intact, in the precise word order stated. Not using “” around a phrase will mean that each word is treated separately, usually with an assumed AND in between each one. For example:

pork sandwich

would give results that contain ‘pork‘ and ‘sandwich‘, but not necessarily in the same sentence or paragraph!

“pork sandwich”

would give results that only contain the phrase ‘pork sandwich‘

() – Brackets

Using brackets is essential for complex search strings, and it can be their application that causes the most confusion. Essentially, a clause within brackets is given priority over other elements around it. The most common place that brackets are applied by recruiters is in the use of OR strings. Perhaps a good example would be company names. You have a list of target companies from where you wish to find your talent, and a candidate can have worked at any one (or ideally several) of them. You might initially construct a command like this:

IBM OR Oracle OR “Red Hat” OR Microsoft

These are all large companies though, so any search like this is likely to generate a large number of results. If you wanted to find just individuals who have reached Manager or Director level, then you might use the following command:

“Manager” OR “Director”

To combine both commands into one search, we use brackets to tell the search engine that these are separate conditions. In order to tell the search engine that we want to see results containing either Manager or Director and also one of IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, or Microsoft, we group them like this:

(“Manager” OR “Director”) AND (IBM OR Oracle OR “Red Hat” OR Microsoft)

It makes no difference which order the two bracketed sections go; the same results will result either way.

1. Search London marketeers on LinkedIn

site:linkedIn.com/pub “marketing manager” London

This string is looking for the linkedin profiles of marketing professionals in London.

The results for this search include a lot of profiles that just mention London – ensure that you se

arch uk.linkedin.com to just see UK profiles.

You may also see some directory pages coming up in your results, you can get rid of these on Google using -inurl:dir
Your string will then be site:uk.linkedin.com/pub “marketing manager” London –inurl:dir

Use different job titles and industry keywords to look for the types of candidates you are interested in. Add more skill or qualification keywords to narrow your results.

You might want to add more location names too – London for example could be expanded to (London OR Barnet OR Croydon OR Ealing OR Bromley OR Enfield OR Wandsworth OR Southwark OR Lambeth OR Redbridge OR Lewisham OR Hillingdon OR Brent OR Westminster OR Newham OR “Tower Hamlets”). Those are the largest London boroughs by population as listed on Wikipedia.

Bing is very good at finding LinkedIn profiles without polluting the results with too many directory pages and the like. This means that you see better results with less need to be too exact with your Boolean skills.

If you’re using long lists of place names like the one above, you might be better to use Google. Google will take 32 search terms but Bing limits search queries to 150 characters in length.

2. Search London marketing event attendees

list (conference OR expo OR workshop OR seminar) (London OR UK) Marketing

This string is looking for lists of people from marketing events in London. This could be lists of attendees or speakers etc.

The brackets in these strings are not strictly necessary – Google totally ignores them and the strings follow Bing’s natural order of operations anyway. I like to use them though, if only to keep my own thoughts organised.

This string returns lots of interesting information about marketing sites, networks and events but not much in the way of rich people data. You could include people keywords like (attendee OR delegate OR member).

You’ll then notice that some of the actual delegate lists in your results are pdf files. Delegate lists are often in pdf or SpreadSheet formats – so adding something like (filetype:pdf OR filetype:xls) to your string will probably bring back lots of rich results. Even if events aren’t marketing focused, the people on the list might have “marketing” in their job titles.

To make the results relevant to you, start by changing the industry and location keywords as appropriate. You could try using a job title of interest along with a broad industry keyword.

3. Search for CVs Uploaded to Scribd

site:scribd.com (CV OR Vitae) (UK OR “united kingdom”)

This search string is looking at pages from the document hosting website Scribd. I think of Scribd as a YouTube for documents instead of videos. People upload all sort of documents like reports, magazines, presentations and even CVs.

I found a lot of template and example CVs on Scribd so it helps to add -template -sample -example to your string to eliminate these.

Add industry keywords or job titles to the string to see if there are any CVs of interest to you on Scribd.

Google seems to get to the CVs of real people much easier than Bing does. I found that the results I got from Bing were dominated by documents from just one Scribd user.

There are lots of document sites like Scribd, you could also try site searching issuu, docstoc andSlideShare.