How to use Boolean search on LinkedIn Recruiter (and why it’s going extinct soon!)

The most commonly used sourcing platform in the agency world is LinkedIn Recruiter, and for good reason! It’s got the most up-to-date and in-depth data on candidates and features way deeper filters than plain old LinkedIn Premium. Boolean search has long been the most powerful search feature on LinkedIn Recruiter, but as an AI-shaped asteroid approaches, it might soon be going the way of the dinosaurs. Let’s dive into how Boolean search works, it’s shortcomings, and what the future of sourcing could look like!

Boolean search is a way to combine keyword search with different logic like AND, OR, NOT, and exact matches. On Recruiter, you can use Boolean searches on three key fields: job title, company name, and profile keywords. Let’s look at a couple examples of how to use Boolean search.

Let’s say I’m sourcing for a cracked product designer. There’s tons of job-titles that these folks can have: product designer, UI designer, “Design, User Experience” and more. Here’s a Boolean filter I can create:

(UI OR UX OR product OR "user interface" OR "user experience") AND (design OR designer)

Here’s what’s happening:

• The OR operator ensures that a candidate’s title can include any of the words inside the parentheses. A profile could say "UX Designer," "Product Designer," or "User Experience Designer" and still match.

• The AND operator means both conditions must be met—so they must also have “design” or “designer” in their title.

• The quotes ensure that phrases like “User Interface” are treated as a unit rather than separate words.

But Boolean searches can get much more complex. Let’s say I’m pulling in too many interns or junior designers. I can refine my search with the NOT operator:

(UI OR UX OR product OR "user interface" OR "user experience") AND (design OR designer) AND (NOT intern) AND (NOT junior)

Now, anyone with “intern” or “junior” in their job title is automatically filtered out.

Boolean search gets even more powerful when you combine job titles with profile keywords. Let’s say I was looking for applied ML engineers that have deployed AI models at companies, and have less of a research bent. I can use the following boolean in my job title filter:

("software engineer" OR "ML engineer" OR "machine learning engineer" OR "AI engineer")

And combine it with another boolean in the keyword search section:

("deep learning" OR "computer vision" OR "NLP" OR "neural networks")

AND (NOT "research scientist" AND NOT "PhD" AND NOT "academic research")

Here’s what that would look like on Recruiter:

Boolean searches used to be quite powerful and Recruiters got used to using them to narrow down their searches. However, boolean searches have lots of gaps.

First, they’re quite brittle because they’re so robotically looking at keywords. For example, the job title example above would break with the title of just “Designer”, even if the candidate mentioned user interface design in their descriptions. Of course, I could have another boolean in the profile keywords but it’s pretty easy to accidentally exclude relevant profiles.

Next, Boolean search is also limited specifically to keywords, not concepts. You may have a boolean search to find Python engineers, but it’s going to miss someone who mentions Django, a popular Python tool. Unless you have dozens of domain-specific keywords, you’re going to miss a lot of people.

Finally, Boolean search on LinkedIn Recruiter completely ignores time-based filtering for specific job titles and functional areas. You can combine the years of experience filter with a Boolean, but you’ll see wonky results. A teacher that made a career switch to UX design last year could match the 10+ years of experience and our filter above, but that’s clearly not what we meant.

Unlike Boolean, AI-powered search can interpret concepts rather than just words:

• It can understand that “Django” relates to “Python,” so a developer mentioning either term might still be a good match.

• It can pull out contextual clues like how long someone has worked at a company, their industry background, or any certifications they’ve earned.

• It handles synonyms, misspellings, and variations in job titles far more gracefully than any Boolean string could.

That deeper contextual understanding means less time wrestling with parentheses, quotes, and operators, and more time engaging with top-tier candidates.

At Stardex, we see this as the future of sourcing and Booleans as more of a relic of the past. If you’ve been spending a ton of time sifting through profiles on Recruiter and wrangling Boolean searches, please reach out to us at Stardex. We’d love to chat!