An entertaining blog post by Matt Charney was recently brought to my attention in which he tells the world to shut up and stop talking about Boolean strings – he argues that Boolean search is a dying art and that “investing time or energy into becoming a master at Boolean is a lot like learning the fine art of calligraphy … Read More
LinkedIn Certification, Talent Connect and Boolean NOT Update
LinkedIn Recruiter Certification In case you missed it, LinkedIn has launched a recruiter certification program! If you think you’re ready to get certified, between now and December 31, 2013, LinkedIn will waive the exam fee for the first 500 customers that register for the LinkedIn Certified Professional—Recruiter certification exam. Click/see the coupon code below: Before you attempt to take the certification assessment, you … Read More
Talent Sourcing: Man vs. AI/Black Box Semantic Search
Back in March 2010, I had the distinct honor of delivering the keynote presentation at SourceCon on the topic of resume search and match solutions claiming to use artificial intelligence in comparison with people using their natural intelligence for talent discovery and identification. Now that nearly 2 years has passed, and given that in that time I’ve had even more hands-on … Read More
Beyond Boolean Search: Proximity and Weighting
Beyond Basic Boolean Most sourcing, recruiting, and staffing professionals are familiar with the basic Boolean operators of AND, OR, and NOT. However, I have found that few are familiar with what some refer to as “extended” Boolean functionality, such as proximity search and term weighting. Proximity and term weighting, where supported, are not actually logical (Boolean) operators – they are … Read More
Beyond Boolean: Human Capital Information Retrieval
When I recently spoke at SourceCon in New York, I showed an example Boolean search string that could be used as a challenge or an evaluation of a person’s knowledge and ability. The search string looked something like this: (Director or “Project Manage*” or “Program Manage*” or PM*) w/250 xfirstword and (truck* or ship* or rail* or transport* or logistic* … Read More
Boolean Search Does Not = Internet Search
If you read certain sourcing and recruiting blogs and discussion groups, you might get the impression that Boolean search pretty much equals Internet search – such as searching for people and profiles using Google, Yahoo, or other search engines. Some sourcing and recruiting professionals may be surprised to learn that Boolean logic significantly predates the Internet and even computers – by a couple hundred years! … Read More
Basic Boolean Search Operators and Query Modifiers Explained
Basic Boolean Operators Explained No, those aren’t my hands. I never cease to be amazed by what you can find on the Internet and what people take pictures of. Now that I have your attention, this post is going to focus on the basic Boolean search operators and search modifiers symbols and will not go into any detail of the many … Read More