Sourcers and Recruiters have no shortage of tools, tips and tricks at their fingertips to help in searches. Everything is automated or can be automated. For those of us who have been in recruitment beginning in the 1990’s or prior, today’s tools far outweigh fax machines, paper directories, job advertisements in the newspaper, free coffee stands at competitors or business cards inside of books at Borders Books or Barnes & Nobles… just to name a few.
This was close to the emergence of the broader use of the internet in search. Online job boards were just in their infancy and were the true first wave of online searching for profiles. To me, this was the birth of search (I know, we can argue about other times and ways but for me it was).
This was also the mainstream launch of Boolean search. Recruiters were forced to learn and memorize Boolean to help with search.
OLD SCHOOL
Writing Boolean strings from scratch seems to be a tad outdated. Over about the past 5 years, the amount of my team members/colleagues that know how to write a Boolean string from scratch appears to drastically decrease year over year and more gravitate towards Boolean builders. I am more surprised, pleasantly surprised, when I encounter someone that knows how to write stings from scratch.
Writing Boolean is a clean way to organize your thoughts and find an end result or have the ability to go down rabbit holes.
Do you prefer to use a Boolean builder or are you a type-it-out kinda person? Let me know!