Boolean has a reputation problem. Courses make it look like algebra, and recruiters conclude it's for "technical" people. Here's the truth from twenty years of running searches: you need exactly four things.
1. Quotes — "keep these words together"
Without quotes, Google treats staff accountant as two separate words that can appear anywhere on the page. With quotes, "staff accountant" must appear as a phrase.
Rule of thumb: any job title of two or more words gets quotes. So does any multi-word skill, like "accounts payable".
2. OR — "any of these is fine"
OR (capital letters) says you'll accept any one of several options:
"staff accountant" OR "senior accountant" OR "accounting manager"
People title themselves unpredictably. OR is how you cast a net instead of a fishing line. Group your ORs in parentheses when mixing them with other terms:
("staff accountant" OR "senior accountant") "Baltimore"
3. The minus sign — "not this"
A leading - excludes a word. This is the most underused operator in sourcing:
-jobs -sample -template -apply
Those four exclusions alone remove most job postings and resume-template pages from a resume search. (Notice -apply — postings that survive -jobs almost always say "apply.")
4. site: — "only look here"
site:linkedin.com/in limits results to LinkedIn public profiles. site:github.io limits to GitHub Pages, where developers post resumes. This is the whole engine of x-ray sourcing.
What about AND?
Here's a secret: you almost never need to type AND. Google treats a space as AND by default. "staff accountant" "Baltimore" already means both-must-appear.
The mistakes that quietly ruin searches
- An unclosed quote. One missing
"and some engines silently loosen your whole search rather than telling you. If your results suddenly look like random websites, count your quote marks first. - Lowercase or. Written as
or, it's just a word. It must beOR. - Overbuilding. Google stops reading long queries (around 32 words). A tight search beats a kitchen-sink search every time.
Four operators, three traps. That's the whole craft — the rest is practice, and knowing where the candidates actually are, which I will cover in another post. Sign up for my email list to get regular updates on my blog posts!