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      Best Practices for Boolean Searching

      Here are our top tips on how to use Boolean searches within your Firefish CRM

      What is a Boolean Search

      A Boolean Search is a key word search using AND, OR and NOT to streamline through your candidate searches. It is important that AND, OR and NOT are always in upper case or the search will not work.

      Boolean searches are a great way to help accurately filter down your candidate list. There are a few things you need to know in order to run a successful search.

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      Using AND

      You would want to use an AND search if you were looking for a candidate who had experience in more than one area.

      For example, if you were to search Recruitment AND HR your search would pull back all candidates with these keywords in their profile of CV.

      Using OR

      If you’re using an OR search you would be bringing back candidates who have Recruitment OR Recruiting in their profile or CV.

      This is a really good way to make sure that no candidates fall through the cracks and is covering more broad terms.

      Using NOT

      A NOT search is what you would use to make sure you have no cross overs within your search.

      If you want someone with Recruitment experience but not HR you could search Recruitment NOT HR to cover this.

      Brackets & Quotations

      Using brackets is one way of combing search terms in your Boolean Search. If you want to find someone who either has talent or HR experience or both, but also needs to have recruitment experience you could search for the following: (talent or hr) AND recruitment.

      If you were to do a search with brackets using OR, it’s important that you have your OR in the right place as the search will prioritise what’s in the bracket. For example, in this search: talent OR (hr AND recruitment) you would be looking for someone who has talent and a combination of HR and Recruitment.

      On the other hand, if you were wanting to search for an exact phrase or specific combination of words you could incorporate quotation marks into your searches e.g “Human Resources”. An example of a search could be (HR, “Human Resources”) this means that you would be searching for both keywords.