May the Source Be With You - Boolean for Padawans and Jedi Alike

Boolean search remains the backbone of effective sourcing, and getting the fundamentals right matters even in an era of AI-assisted tools. The logic traces back to George Boole, whose true/false algebra underlies the operators sourcers use every day: AND to narrow results, OR to expand them, and NOT to eliminate irrelevant matches.

Common mistakes trip up even experienced searchers. Capitalizing operators like OR incorrectly, adding stray spaces that Google reads as implicit ANDs, capitalizing site commands, or forgetting a quotation mark around an exact phrase like "computer vision" can all quietly break a search and return the wrong candidates.

Key search modifiers and their uses include:

• site: to restrict results to a specific domain
• inurl: to find keywords within a page's web address
• intitle: to find keywords in a page's title
• intext: to find keywords within the body text of a page
• filetype: to surface PDFs, Excel sheets, or documents such as resumes or attendee lists
• Quotation marks for exact phrases, parentheses for grouping like terms, and the asterisk as a wildcard for variable job titles

Data on LinkedIn's own filtering shows how much gets missed even when every relevant search parameter is applied: a large share of profiles matching a search get omitted entirely because of absent or contradictory data, such as candidates listing two current jobs at once. That gap is the reason for building searches manually rather than relying solely on platform filters.

More advanced technique comes from Google dorks, essentially pre-constructed Boolean strings built around specific search patterns, such as combining intitle: or inurl: with terms like "final attendee list" to locate conference rosters, or searching a resume site for a specific candidate name within the URL. Logging successful strings, tracking which search engines and operators produce results, and treating searches like a repeatable experiment all help sourcers refine their process over time rather than starting from scratch with every new search.