Do you use LinkedIn Recruiter? Read on.

Given the UI design for advanced people search dialog in LinkedIn Recruiter (that I would call user-unfriendly), there couldn't possibly be a clean resolution for the vague "companies or boolean" field:

Indeed, if there is one word entered, which is a company name (like Apple), will it be looking for employees of that particular company (Apple) or for people from all the companies with this word ("apple") in the company names? It is unclear from the UI. There is a big difference in the two searches, and we may want to do either. In fact, a basic FREE account conveniently has both capabilities - we can either search for a keyword in the company name or select companies:

Returning to Recruiter - if you select a company from the offered list in the "company or boolean" field, it will NOT search for the keyword, but will just for that company. Thus, it only duplicates the exact same functionality found in another corner of the same vast people search dialog.

However, when I search for a company name, I often want to include that same company, registered as a different entity on LinkedIn (perhaps due to a different location or division). Here is a (random) example of several entries in LinkedIn's company list that seem likely to be part of the same company:

If I go with the company choices, I would need to select each entry separately. For example, if I select the first entry, "Netrix", I get only two results for members whose company is "exactly" Netrix.

Here is a hack that brings back this useful feature, company keyword search, to Recruiter. Use a Boolean string that looks like this. It is a choice between your keyword and something that never happens. Now we get many more results than two:

Problem solved!

• Here is a sourcing challenge for my readers who also have LIR (Recruiter). Suppose we are searching by one keyword in the "company or boolean" field, and that word is not, by itself, a company name. How will the search be interpreted?

Having played with the challenge some more, I have found the shortest string that would look for the keyword, not the company. Just add a space after the word, and get many more results! See below. (The troubling thing is, the same bizarre syntax rules apply to the Job Title). 

Watch for the next post on my blog booleanstrings.com