How Recruiters can use Boolean Searches
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009Recruitment Article of the Day:
How Recruiters can use Boolean Searches by Pushpa Sreenivasan
By Pushpalatha Sreenivasan: The use of Web 2.0 Technologies in Recruitment has been well documented over the last year or so in this blog. While Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook grab most of the headlines one of the less talked about but most effective tools Recruiters can use is using Boolean Searches.
As an introduction if you have not used Boolean searches in the past, a Boolean search is where one enters the key words into a search engine like Google or Yahoo within the inverted commas and use words like OR, AND, NOT which are called as operators with modifiers such as Quotation Marks “” and Parentheses () to narrow the search.
For example, OR can be used to search to include results that contain either of the words you are looking for. For example EAI OR EIM. OR is a good tool to use when there are several common spellings or synonyms of a word.
As for AND, its used for inclusion of key words. For example if I’m searching for a Java Developer, as I need both the key words “Java” and Developer to be present in the CV I need to give a command like this in the search engine – “Java AND Developer
The “AND” operator narrows the search down by combining the key words.
This way, one can play with the Bolean operators to narrow the search and get precisely what one is looking for.
How does Boolean Search help in recruiting?
Firstly, it comes handy to sort out the information a Recruiter is looking for. Once the data is sorted, then the search conducted within sorted data proves even more effective than search with the raw data. Also, Boolean search has the capability to increase the search in terms of speed and efficiency when searching profiles online through search engines. One of the ways to get a hang of it is trying with various operators with some permutation and combination.
If you are a job seeker and want to get much more visibility of your profile make sure your skills and experiences are clearly defined in the form of key words and people know how to get in touch with you.
Another best ways of using Boolean Search is not sticking to one search engine. Using multiple search engines enhances one’s access to certain extraordinary information, which sometimes your most favourite search engine would not be able to pick up. This is quite interesting and also the introduction of this new search engine www.zuula.com. In its own words, Zuula is an innovative Internet search service that gives its users quick access to web, image, video, news, blog and job search results from all the major search engines. This really comes handy as one need not hop from one search engine to other.
The author of this article has been with the Oracle India Recruitment Team for the past three years and can be contacted at pushpalatha.sreenivasan@oracle.com
