Boolean Search Strings for a Sales Tax Manager

Posted at January 9, 2009

Boolean Search Strings for a Sales/Use Tax Manager

NOTE!
For those who have absolutely no interest in seeing search examples for a tax manager position, the search principles and tips contained in the post can be applied to ANY SEARCH, and you may also be interested in a demonstration of the NEAR operator, as well as a couple of ”hidden lessons” in the Google search section of this post.

Boolean Search Strings for a Sales/Use Tax Manager

Recently I recieved a request for some search help with crafting Booleans for a Tax Manager with sales/use tax experience. I experimented with some searches using a few different resources and thought I would share the exercise with you - the searches you see below can serve as good starting points and get your imagination going.

We’ll take a look at search ideas for Monster (leveraging the NEAR operator), Careerbuilder/Hotjobs, and Google, and LinkedIn via Google.

Monster

This search is for Monster only – taking advantage of the fact that it’s the only major job board that recognizes the NEAR operator:

(CPA or “C.P.A.” or “certified public”) and (accounting or audit* or tax*) NEAR (Manager or Supervisor) and tax* NEAR (state or local) and (sales or use) NEAR tax* and tax*

Hint: the multiple mentions of tax* is NOT redundant.

Notice I did not search for any specific title. One of the beautiful aspects of the NEAR operator is that you don’t have to worry about thinking of all of the various titles your target candidates could possibly have. The above search will return results of anyone who mentions any combination of tax and manager within 10 words of each other. Also, you’ll see I specifically targeted any word starting with the root of “tax” to be mentioned within 10 words of (state or local) and (sales or use), increasing the likelihood that they would be mentioned in the same sentence and therefore more relevant to the search and what we’re looking for.

Here are some examples:

Looking good, yes? Notice how in the second sample resume the title is “Tax and Accounting Manager.” Anyone who was searching only for “Tax Manager” and “Manager of Tax” types of titles would not be able to find this person. However, the NEAR operator frees us from having to target specific titles and nets us people like the candidate above. Thanks NEAR operator!

Configurable Proximity

If you had access to a resume database that supports configurable proximity (which I knew the person who requested help did), you could get even more precise, closing the word gap down from 10 (the distance of the NEAR operator on Monster) to 5 and 8:

(CPA or “C.P.A.” or “certified public”) and audit* and (manager or supervisor) w/5 (accounting or audit* or tax*) and tax* w/8 (state or local) and (sales or use) w/8 tax* and tax*

Configurable proximity searching is a beautiful thing.

Careerbuilder/Hotjobs

Without the ability to use proximity, we’ll have to go back to a more standard search and target titles for a first pass. While I am not a big fan of title searches because if you forget a title (or two, or more!), you leave great candidates behind in a hidden talent pool as we just saw above with the “Tax and Accounting Manager”, it’s a good start to “sniper” in on the people who are holding a neon sign over their head saying, “Hey! I’m a Tax Manager!”

(CPA or “C.P.A.” or “certified public”) and (”tax manager” or ”manager of tax” or “accounting manager” or “tax supervisor” or “manager tax”) and tax* and (state or local) and (sales or use)

You may be wondering why I used “manager tax” – I did so because there are some companies and people who list the title of: Manager, Tax.

To make a second pass at this search and avoid all of the folks we found and reviewed from the first search, we can use the NOT operator in a way you can’t on Google:

(CPA or “C.P.A.” or “certified public”) and NOT (”tax manager” or ”manager of tax” or “accounting manager” or “tax supervisor” or “manager tax”) and tax* and (manager or director or supervisor) and (state or local) and (sales or use)

That search results in a mutually exclusive result set from the first title search.

Google

For this example, I’ll target a specific area – Minneapolis, MN. My first example will target area codes I pulled from nanpa.

That search pulls 12 results, of which only 1 is viable (the first one).

You may be asking why I didn’t use -~job or something like that. Good question – thank you for asking.

You will find that if you add something like that that to the original search, you will actually eliminate the only viable result, which happens to be a resume on a site called resumebucket. If you clicked the link, you’ll see the word “job” in the upper right hand portion of the site where users can perform a job search.

Also, you will notice that the 1 viable resume from the original Google search has the words “job duties” in each of the candidate’s experiences. Interesting, yes?

If you’re REALLY perspicacious, you will also notice on the left hand side of the resumebucket resume result, the words “sample resumes.”

So if you decided to try and use -”resumes” or -sample, you can say “bye bye” to the only real result available in the search.

The moral of the story here is be careful before you wave the “magic wand of false positive removal” when creating your Booleans and trying to get rid of results that mention the word job, jobs, resumes, or sample. You just might be eliminating results you can actually use!

Just for kicks, let’s revisit the search, and instead of using area codes, let’s try and target zip codes in a 30 mile radius of 55401. I used zipmath to find all of the zip codes, and will leverage Google’s numrange search functionality.

Well, that gets us 11 results, but only 1 additional unique resume (the second result).

Now, reviewing this resume – it doesn’t look like he’s qualified, but we do get to learn a valuable lesson. Notice how he does NOT mention a phone number, but DOES mention a zip code. So this teaches us that it’s not a good idea to search for people in a specific location by area code or zip code – you should at least do both. Of course, you could also shoot for mention of the state or state abbreviation, but then you lose the ability to control WHERE they live in the state, which is kinda useful in most cases unless you can relocate people.

There are some sourcing professionals who say that the (intitle:resume | inurl:resume) is too limiting – I don’t really agree. While it’s true that not everyone in the world titles their resume with “resume,” I find that if I do not shoot for (intitle:resume | inurl:resume), I get lots of non-resume junk even when I search for the word “resume.” Let’s put that idea to the test here.

Notice how I used the minus sign to get rid of the results we’ve already seen that happen to have the word “resume” in the title or url. Also, without (intitle:resume | inurl:resume), I did have to resort to using the wand of false positive removal (-~job -~jobs). Yes, we could have also used -sample, -eoe, etc. I tried the -eoe and got the same number of results, and while there is a result with the word “sample” in it – be careful when using this word as a false positive removal tool. Just as we learned earlier, there are candidates who can mention the word “sample” or “samples” in their resume.

Click here to review the results. Nothing viable, just junk and some jobs that slipped through.

Also – I could not finish this Google search section of the post without saying that this is yet another exercise in how few resumes are actually on the Internet, especially for certain types of people. In my experience, there just aren’t a lot of finance and accounting people with resumes on the Internet. If you’re feeling my pain on this one, be sure to read this post on The Internet has free resumes – SO WHAT?

LinkedIn via Google

Let’s target the Minneapolis area going for specific titles first and leverage the trusty site: command

Click here to view the results. Looking good!

You could go a little looser on titles to catch alternates (but you’ll pick up some garbage along the way):

site:linkedin.com “greater minneapolis-St. Paul area” “manager” ~tax (”sales” | “use”) (CPA | “C.P.A.” | “certified public”) -inurl:jobid -inurl:find -intitle:directory -inurl:answers -~inurl:updates

Click here to view the results.

Final thoughts

There are many ways to tweak those searches to find more candidates, such as using the NOT/- operator to experiment with eliminating some of the search terms and targeting others, or targeting director level tax professionals as well as tax accountants in addition to supervisors and managers to network and generate referrals, but this was a good exercise and it covered a number of best practices. Additonally, hopefully we all learned something – to be careful before wielding the NOT/- operator to get rid of false positives, because sometimes it can actually eliminate the only real results!

For anyone who made it this far and is still reading…thanks! Seriously though – next week I will put out 2 more posts on semantic search. I’ve been watching my stats and I am getting crazy interest in the concept so I’ll be feeding the fire next week. Stay tuned!