Sourcecon 2013: Five Easy Steps to Building Winning Boolean Search Strings

Sourcecon 2013: Five Easy Steps to Building Winning Boolean Search Strings

The Session was a Boolean operator/search string 101. John Childs who ran the session went through the most common operators; AND, OR, wild cards, and more.

Johns 5 step basics:

Step 1 is “read the JD and extract real requirements”

Step 2 create a string with blank parenthesis and in between them put the “AND” operator

Step 3 insert your requirements into the parenthesis

Step 4 ensure you keep all associated key words within one set of parenthesis

Step 5: Run the search

Now this is a very simplified version of the process but for a beginner recruiter it works. Obviously to really create a great string you need more. Of course after you run your string and see some of the results you want to modify your results for even better results.

The key take away was ensure you read the JD and extract the real requirement both written and implied.

Comment by Irina Shamaeva on October 7, 2013 at 11:20pm: Some of the info presented at that session was, unfortunately, wrong. :(

John Childs should have checked with (easily available) Google help before presenting.

It's a shame that people who attended the session at "the" sourcing conference in the US, who are new to this, got the wrong info about the basics of the Boolean search syntax on Google.

There's a little more on that, including a copy of one of the slides, on my blog http://booleanstrings.com/2013/10/07/sourcecon-seattle-2013-impress...

While some things about recruiting are a matter of opinion (like, what works better? or what is the best way to contact a potential candidate?) here it is not anyone's opinions but is a defined, computer-understood Boolean search language. The syntax elements are documented; sample searches can also help to verify how this stuff works.