Boolean
Boolean Search Strings, Referrals and Source of Hire
I read an article on ERE about the other day titled “Love Writing Boolean Instead of Recruiting? Then Don’t Read This Post.” While I happen to be pretty good at and thoroughly enjoy writing Boolean queries for talent mining, I actually love the entire recruiting life cycle. Sourcing is a means to an end, not [...]
What is a Boolean Black Belt Anyway?
I’ve been blogging nearly 3 years now, and I realized I’ve never come out and actually defined the term ”Boolean Black Belt.” The concept seems pretty self explanatory, but there has been at least 1 person who’s taken the opportunity to point out (and gain some traffic in the process – but it’s all good!) that it could be perceived as a [...]
LinkedIn’s Undocumented Search Operator
Earlier this year, I wrote an article on how to use LinkedIn’s advanced search operators as search agents in which I briefly mentioned and demonstrated an undocumented LinkedIn search operator at the very end of the post. Did you catch it? If not, you’re in luck. Although it’s not an Earth-shattering discovery by any means, [...]
Beyond Boolean Search: Proximity and Weighting
Beyond Basic Boolean Most sourcing, recruiting, and staffing professionals are familiar with the basic Boolean operators of AND, OR, and NOT. However, I have found that few are familiar with what some refer to as “extended” Boolean functionality, such as proximity search and term weighting. Proximity and term weighting, where supported, are not actually logical [...]
Beyond Boolean: Human Capital Information Retrieval
When I recently spoke at SourceCon in New York, I showed an example Boolean search string that could be used as a challenge or an evaluation of a person’s knowledge and ability. The search string looked something like this: (Director or “Project Manage*” or “Program Manage*” or PM*) w/250 xfirstword and (truck* or ship* or [...]
Are You Fluent in the Language of Information Systems?
If you traveled to a foreign country where you don’t speak the local language, you would find yourself in a situation where there are questions you would want to ask people and things you’ll need to know, and nearly everyone you run into would be able to help you - but because you can’t articulate in a manner that the locals understand, they can’t assist you [...]
Boolean Search String Experiment #2
Back in November, I posted a Boolean search challenge to demonstrate that when you give a number of sourcers and recruiters the same job description/hiring profile to search for, you will get as many different searches and search strategies as you have sourcers and recruiters. As I have said many times before, every search string [...]
Boolean Search String Experiment Follow Up
On November 8th, 2010, I wrote a post containing a Boolean search challenge and an experiment of sorts – I asked readers to share their approach and Boolean search strings for a basic job description. The inspiration for the experiment came from the fact that very few people seem to be consciously aware of the [...]
Boolean Search String Experiment – Are You Game?
One of the most interesting yet overlooked aspects associated with sourcing candidates using the Internet, job board databases, ATS/CRM systems and social networks such as LinkedIn is that as long as your syntax is correct, every search “works.” This fact leads (too) many people to believe that finding talent online is easy and that there [...]
How to Automatically Build Boolean OR Strings
Writing Boolean search strings is typically a quick and simple affair, as most search engines and databases won’t let you construct anything longer than a few hundred characters. However, if you’re not constrained to a fixed limit on search terms (such as Google’s 32 words) or characters, it’s no longer a simple matter of “this [...]
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