Boolean: How to create fiendishly complex Boolean strings in seconds

Backdrop

Boolean is often the nemesis of many recruiters. Understanding where to put your ANDs, ORs or NOTs can be tricky, let alone where to put () or "" to wrap around key phrases.

Clearly the objective of any good boolean search string is to quickly identify people on a CV database that could do the role.

TalentKoala makes this process really easy and with zero technical understanding or code manipulation.

Getting started

You can create a Boolean string either from a job advert you've just created in Adverts, or you can upload a job description and go straight from there.

Either way, once the system has your source information, it will create the Boolean for you.

How The Boolean Is Built

TalentKoala creates the string in several areas, with 'included' terms (in green pill boxes) and 'excluded' terms (in red pill boxes):

1. Job titles

TalentKoala will pull out the job title for the role you're looking to recruit and will also select a range of similar job titles that your ideal hire could be working as right now. It will also exclude job titles that it thinks aren't right. You can edit any of these as you see fit by either removing them, or adding to them by clicking on the '+' icon

2. Industries and competitors

TalentKoala will also use the hiring company name to work out which industries the ideal hire could be in, as well as a range of direct competitors that they could be working for (now or in the past)

3. Skills and qualifications

In this section TalentKoala will pull out relevant skills and qualifications from the job description, and it will suggest others that it thinks could be relevant to be job. It will not exclude any skills so if you need to do this, you'll need to do it manually.

4. Locations

TalentKoala will detect where the role is located and include surrounding areas in the Boolean string.

The Final Output

As you make any changes your Boolean string is automatically amended at the bottom of the screen. All the ANDs, ORs and NOTs are in the right place - all you have to do is click the copy button and paste the string into your CV database or search tool.