Never Build Boolean Search Strings Again!

Last week we sat down with a number of recruiters and found that a few of them struggled with building Google search queries correctly, so like good engineers, we thought there might be a better solution and built a Boolean Search String Generator for them. We got some feedback from users who wanted a Location field and updated our tool again last night. You can go here to check it out.

To help you get a little more out of this, let’s do an example:

Let’s say you’re looking for a Software Design Engineer who lives in Portland with some of these skills, HTML, CSS, Javascript, ASP.NET and C#, amongst the publicly available resumes on the web. Here’s what you would do with our Boolean Search Tool.

1. In “All of these exact phrases” enter in: “Software Design Engineer”
2. In “At least one of these phrases” enter in: “HTML, CSS, Javascript, ASP.NET, C#”
3. For “Location” enter in: “Portland”
4. Click the “Add Conditions” button
5. In the drop down select “File Types” and put in “PDF”

Here is an example screenshot:

Click “Build It” to get this string:

“Software Design Engineer” Portland filetype:PDF ( HTML OR CSS OR Javascript OR ASP.NET OR C# )

and then click “Google It!” You should get a Google query with PDF resumes with people with the above skills. Here’s what we got:

Now you can download these resumes to look for qualified candidates!

Enjoy!

Alvin.

10/14/2014 — Author’s Note: We have a new version of this Boolean Search String Generator with some improvements. To learn more about it, go here.

Alvin works at Jobvention. Jobvention makes an applicant tracking system for companies and tools for recruiters, learn more at www.jobvention.com. You can also contact Alvin directly at alvin@jobvention.com or connect with him on LinkedIn. We can also be found on Twitter at @Jobvention.