Beginner's Guide to Boolean

What is Boolean Search?

Boolean Search is a way to organise your search using a combination of keywords and the 3 main Boolean operators (AND, OR and NOT), to produce more accurate and more relevant results for your candidate searches on LinkedIn and beyond. The first important thing to about Boolean, is that there are only 5 elements of syntax to understand.

Which are: AND OR NOT () """

Applying these appropriately, along with the keywords you wish to consider, you can create a huge range of search operations. There is no limit to how often you can use any of these elements in a search, so you can create very specific search strings, which will save you a lot of time in filtering the results.

Brackets ()

When using Boolean search, there is no way to determine how the computer will solve our equation. This means we have to use something called parentheses to tell the computer what to solve first. This is where using brackets comes into our Boolean search. The clause within brackets is given priority over other elements around it.

Quotations “”

Use quotations wherever you have two or more words as a phrase in your Boolean search string that you know for certain should be right beside one another like “Information Technology” or “Human Resources”, as quotations define a number of words as one exact term.