Recruitment -A skill to harness

Finding the best candidates can take time and effort. After all, there is likely to be a range of different aspects that you are looking for in your new employee and it can be difficult to narrow this down in your search. Thankfully, using Boolean search strings enables you to achieve a more specific search. By combining keywords and phrases within the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, “speech marks” and (brackets), you are able to limit, widen or define your search. This means that you’re presented with only the most relevant candidates.

Boolean search: Boolean search is a structured search process that allows the user to insert words or phrases such as AND, OR, NOT to limit, broaden and define the search results. By using Boolean search, employers can narrow down the pool of candidates they are presented with by specifically looking for what is required in that role.

How to use Boolean search in recruitment: It relates to using these techniques to search and filter through resumes, search engines, targeted websites, or ATS systems to find and shortlist candidates that fit your search parameters.

How to perform a Boolean search: Boolean searches can be done on any search engine across the Internet using certain symbols and there is no restriction on how many you use in one search string.

Five elements of Boolean search:

1. AND: placing AND between search keywords will allow user's results to include both (and all) of the keywords. The search terms that follow the AND must appear in the search results. Venn diagram of the Boolean AND operator A AND B | A ∩ B

2. OR: user writes OR when he/she wants to search for something that has the possibility of including either set of search terms. All combination possibilities will come up. Venn diagram of the Boolean OR operator A OR B | A ∪ B

3. NOT: when a user does not want a specific search term to appear in the results, he/she writes NOT after the preferred search term. This will prevent the terms from coming up.

Exclude irrelevant results: When looking for passive candidates, you may often stumble upon pages with job ads, sample resumes or resume services. All these are irrelevant to your search (false positives) and can be excluded using the NOT (“-”) operator. Add terms based on the irrelevant results you get each time. Venn diagram of the Boolean NOT operator A NOT B | A – B

4. Quotation marks “”: when users want to search for an exact phrase, they use quotation marks around that phrase.

5. Parentheses (): placing parentheses allows separation of the terms and preference to be given to specified ones. For example, ‘(developer OR designer) AND Java’

Boolean Strings by Job Title:

Below are search string examples sorted by job title. Copy and paste each one as-is or edit to fit your search needs.

1. System Admin: ("Systems Administrator" OR "systems Admin" OR "system Administrator" OR "system admin" or "Unix admin" or "Unix administrator" or "Linux admin" or "Linux administrator" or "system engineer" or "systems engineer") AND (install* or upgrade* or "software package" or "software packages") AND (UNIX or Linux)

2. Net Developer: .NET AND (VS OR "Visual Studio") AND (VB OR "Visual Basic" OR VB.net) AND (ASP OR ASP.net) AND (C# OR C#.net) AND "SQL Server"

3. Android Developer: Android AND SDK AND Java AND SQLite AND (SVN OR subversion)

4. Automation Tester: ("QA" OR "quality assurance" OR "quality analyst" OR "automation tester") AND "SQL" AND agile AND scrum AND rest AND soap AND "java" AND (cucumber OR "jet brains" OR gherkin OR "cmm" OR "cmmi" OR "cast" OR "cste" OR "cmst" OR certified OR certification OR certi*)

5. Database Administrator:("database administration" OR "database administrator" OR "DB Admin" OR DBA) AND (SQL OR "SQL Server")

6. Java Developer: Java AND SQL AND ("object oriented" OR object-oriented OR "OO" OR "OOP" OR "OOAD" OR EJB OR J2EE OR Linux OR Hibernate OR MySQL OR Subversion OR SVN

Skills to Keep in Mind While Sourcing for Particular Tech-Stack:

1. Big Data Technologies - Hadoop Hive Sqoop Pig Oozie Scala Kafka spark are few skills added in this list.

2. Devops - Combination of development and operations. CI/CD - continuous integration and continuous deployment. Configuration management skills are - Jenkins, Git, Ansible, Bamboo, Chef puppet.

3. Data Scientist - Skills used are python, R scripting, SAS, Statistical analysis, Machine learning, algorithms.

4. Cloud - AWS, Azure, Open stack, IBM Cloud, Google cloud.

5. Java full stack - combination of front end and back end. Front end - JavaScript, html, CSS, Angular, backbone, React. Backend - Spring, Hibernate, struts, JSP, Microservices, NodeJS, web services.

6. UI/UX/Graphic Designer/Front end developer

7. DBA - Oracle, Pl/SQL, SQL, MySQL, NoSQL - MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, MariaDB.

8. Business Intelligence Tools - MS BI, Tableau, MicroStrategy, Power BI, QlikView (These are mostly used in Reporting service).

9. DOTNET Developer - C#, Ajax, Ado.net, MVC, ASP.net, WPF, WCF

10. Network engineer/admin - Router switch TCP/IP, Data Centre, Server, Active directory, LAN, WAN.

11. Testing -Manual, Automation includes QTP, Selenium, Cucumber.