Champions of Boolean – A Talent Search Workshop for Sourcers and Recruiters

Boolean search remains the backbone of effective sourcing, and a working session on the topic breaks down the operators, symbols and search strings that turn a vague candidate profile into a usable list of names. The content moves from fundamentals to live, on-screen examples of search strings built and tested in real time.

• The core operators: AND, OR (or the pipe symbol), NOT (or a dash), parentheses for nesting terms, quotation marks for exact phrases, and the asterisk as a wildcard for root words like manag* or engineer*.
• Advanced commands including site: to restrict results to a single domain, filetype: to find PDFs, Word docs or spreadsheets, intitle: and inurl: to locate resumes and profiles, AROUND(X) to find keywords within a set number of words of each other, and number ranges for years, salaries or other numeric spans.
• Sample strings for sourcing nurses by X-raying Google Docs for resumes and CVs while excluding templates and job postings, pulling conference attendee directories from event sites, and finding healthcare professionals on Instagram and Facebook using anchor words like hometown or current city.
• A live-built string for ASIC engineers using a country-specific LinkedIn URL, combining wildcard terms with hardware acronyms such as GDB, RTL, UVM and SystemC to surface relevant profiles.
• A file-type search for firmware and embedded engineering resumes, nesting terms for hardware, firmware or embedded roles alongside Linux distributions, while excluding sample and template results.
• Approaches for widening candidate pools by diversity, including searching hashtags used on LinkedIn and Twitter, referencing historically black colleges and universities, targeting locations with concentrated demographic populations from census data, and including sororities, fraternities and pronoun references in search terms.

Throughout, the emphasis stays on testing and iterating: starting with simple anchor words that reliably appear on a target page, then layering in operators like AROUND to tighten or loosen results as needed, and adjusting search term limits by favoring pipes over spelled-out "or" statements when working within a search engine's character constraints.