Boolean search is old-fashioned and still the most reliable way to find people. It does exactly what you ask, rather than what software guessed you meant.
What Boolean means
It just means joining search words together with a few simple instructions. Five of them do almost all the work.
| Word | What it does | Watch out |
|---|---|---|
AND | Both things must appear | Every AND you add shrinks the results a lot |
OR | Either thing | This is where your alternatives go. The most useful one |
NOT or - | Leaves things out | Use sparingly. It removes people you cannot see |
"quotes" | This exact phrase | Essential for job titles. Rarely right for skills |
(brackets) | Groups words together | Leaving these out is the most common mistake |
site: | Search inside one website | The basis of the next lesson |
Build every search in three blocks
Keeping them separate means you can change one without breaking the others.
- Job titles — in quotes, joined by OR.
- Skills or tools — joined by OR. One group per idea, never mixed.
- Location — joined by OR, because cities have several names.
Then a few exclusions, mostly to remove job adverts and other recruiters rather than candidates.
Here is one put together:
("data engineer" OR "analytics engineer" OR "ETL developer")
AND (dbt OR airflow OR "data pipeline")
AND (Bengaluru OR Bangalore)
-"hiring" -"job description"
The four mistakes everyone makes
- Forgetting brackets.
python OR java AND seniordoes not mean what you think. The computer does the AND first, so you get "python", plus "java senior". Always put brackets round your OR groups. - Too many ANDs. Each idea you add does not narrow the results a little. It multiplies. Four AND groups usually leaves you with almost nothing and the false impression that nobody exists.
- Too many quotes. Putting a skill in quotes when people write it five different ways means you miss four of them. Quote job titles. Rarely quote skills.
- Only using job titles. Companies name jobs differently. Titles with no skill block find the right words attached to the wrong people, and miss the right people with odd titles.
Keep your searches
Save them in a plain text file next to the job, with the date and one line on what you changed. Not for tidiness — for working out what went wrong later. When a search that worked last month starts returning rubbish, the only way to know whether the search changed, the website changed, or the market changed is to have the old version to compare.
That same file becomes your starting point next time you hire this kind of person. That is where the real time saving is.
Download the Boolean cheat sheet · all templates
Test before you scale
Run any new search, open the first ten results, and count how many are plausibly the right person. Fewer than five? Fix the search instead of reading 200 results. This thirty-second check saves more time than anything else in this module.