Here is a “double alert” I have just copied from my screen. A rare error occurred, and Boolean is going away in Recruiter Lite.
If you wanted to search, for example, for someone whose job title is (Engineer OR Developer) NOT Manager, you will no longer be able to do so.
Of the current choices of premium personal accounts,
it looks like only Navigator and Lite have advanced search. Lite doesn’t have Boolean, we are told. Navigator has something called “Lead Builder” that doesn’t sound like “Boolean” to me. Is Boolean search going away from all accounts?
LinkedIn suggests to people who want to use Boolean search to upgrade to LinkedIn Recruiter. (By the way, is the assumption that only recruiters, of all LinkedIn members, may want to use Boolean search syntax?)
The problem for the fans of traditional Boolean search is not just that LinkedIn Recruiter is expensive; its search syntax is not exactly Boolean – it’s complicated and user-unfriendly. Just to give you one example – in LinkedIn Recruiter, the second search below brings up more results than the first:
- Software Engineer
- Software Engineer NOT Senior
(Did you think the first search should bring more results?)
In our sourcing practice, we find that searching on Google can be well done without writing long OR statements or exclusions using the minus. That is because Google has done a lot to understand what people are looking for, “read between the lines”, and show related results.
LinkedIn, on the other hand, doesn’t even “know” standard abbreviations, let alone synonyms; so on LinkedIn, we have always looked for terminology variations using OR statements. Not knowing even the basics on the job titles (VP and “Vice President” in the Job Title field search bring different results), it will not be able to provide us with intelligent suggestions.
We can’t just walk away from LinkedIn – it has so much professional data! But the lack of access to Boolean syntax on LinkedIn is going to lead to productivity loss, and not just for recruiters.
Bottom line:
- No Boolean in free LinkedIn accounts
- No Boolean in any premium LinkedIn accounts, including Job Seeker, Business, Sales Navigator, and Recruiter Lite
- No Boolean in LinkedIn Recruiter
I would be glad if the announcements of the Boolean death on LinkedIn are wrong! But to get ready for the new era, you might want to look into our (most popular!) workshop “Sourcing Without LinkedIn” to learn to utilize other sources and “Boolean Strings Basics” to brush up on X-Raying.