(Part 1) Linkedin Boolean Search (Don’t pay for ineffective trainings)

There are many people on the Czech market offering LinkedIn trainings, most of them are expensive, full of old tricks and pretty ineffective. So you don’t need to crack the code of LinkedIn; you need to learn the "code". And first thing you need to learn is Boolean search, this will help you a lot.

So save your money, when you can learn these LinkedIn basics for free. But if you still want to pay for the ineffective training, that’s up to you. But rather spend your money on something better and help some people that really need your help http://www.clovekvtisni.cz/.

But everybody has a choice to learn for free or pay for the training. Choices are like connecting highways. They all take you to the same place. Some just take longer to get there.

First lesson, learn the basics

Learn how to search for the right keywords and create the search string.

When you use Boolean search operators on LinkedIn, you are able to search the entire LinkedIn universe, not just your network. The string that you are going to use is going to entire profile, including the summary and headline. The number of results you will get also depending on your level of LinkedIn membership, if you have free account you will see only small number of profiles (only 100) 

Boolean operators

Quoted searches

" "     keep words together for an exact phrase

Example string: Junior developer - would give results that contain ‘junior‘ and ‘developer‘, but not necessarily in the same sentence or paragraph, but if you use the quoted searches "junior developer", that will give results that only contain the phrase ‘junior developer‘

Note: don’t forgot to create the Boolean search in notepad and not in Word. 

(Open Notepad by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button. In the search box, type Notepad, and then, in the list of results, click Notepad.)

AND 
- search for two terms at once
- Example: engineer AND “senior developer”
- Example 2: developer AND Prague

OR 
- find either or both terms
- Example: developer OR programmer
- Example 2: "junior developer"  OR " senior programmer"

NOT
- eliminate terms

- Example: architect NOT "software architect"

( ) – Brackets

Using brackets is essential for complex search strings. Essentially, a clause within brackets is given priority over other elements around it. The most common place that brackets are applied by recruiters is in the use of OR strings.

Perhaps a good example would be company names. If you have list of companies, that you would like to target because they had the right people for you.

Accenture OR Yahoo OR Google OR "Barclays Capital"

These large companies are going to generate a large number of results. If you wanted to find just individuals who have reached Manager or Director Level, then you might use this command: Manager OR Director

To combine both commands into one search, we use brackets to tell the search engine that these are separate conditions.

(Manager OR Director) AND (Accenture OR Yahoo OR Google OR "Barclays Capital")

Parenthetical searches 

- To do a complex search, you can combine terms using parentheses. For example, to find people who have "VP" in their profiles, or have both director AND division in their profiles, type: VP OR (director AND division) 

Online tools and quick sheet

You can also use this quick sheet from LinkedIn http://talent.linkedin.com/assets/Product-Pages/Training/TipSheet-BooleanSearching.pdf

If you are not able to create Boolean search right now, you can try this tool http://recruitin.net/ it will help you.


Next time search synonyms, Boolean examples… Google / LinkedIn X-Ray Search and more cool things.