Boolean Search for Recruiters: 12 Copyable Strings

Boolean search combines alternative titles with OR and must-have skills with AND. Brackets keep those groups together; quotes match a phrase. The role strings below are starting points for LinkedIn Recruiter or a CV database. Google uses different exclusion syntax, and GitHub has its own search qualifiers.

12 search strings by role

Change the titles and skill blocks to fit your brief. Use LinkedIn Recruiter’s Keywords field or check your CV database’s operator support. The Google X-ray examples follow the twelve role strings. Start without broad NOT exclusions: a good candidate may mention an unwanted title elsewhere in their history. Where possible, exclude current titles through the platform’s title filter after reviewing the initial results.

("accounts payable" OR "AP clerk" OR "AP specialist" OR "purchase ledger") AND (SAP OR Oracle OR NetSuite OR Sage OR Xero)

("payroll manager" OR "payroll lead" OR "head of payroll" OR "payroll team leader") AND (CIPP OR "Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals") AND (PAYE OR "year end" OR "P11D")

(python OR django OR fastapi OR flask) AND (backend OR "back-end" OR "back end" OR API) AND (AWS OR GCP OR Azure)

(DevOps OR SRE OR "site reliability" OR "platform engineer" OR "infrastructure engineer") AND (Kubernetes OR k8s OR EKS OR AKS OR GKE) AND (Terraform OR Pulumi OR CloudFormation)

("data analyst" OR "BI analyst" OR "business intelligence analyst" OR "insight analyst" OR "reporting analyst") AND SQL AND ("Power BI" OR Tableau OR Looker)

("registered nurse" OR RN) AND (ICU OR "intensive care" OR "critical care" OR CCRN) AND (ACLS OR BLS)

("class 1" OR "C+E" OR "CE licence" OR HGV1) AND (driver OR driving) AND (CPC OR "driver CPC") AND (ADR OR hiab OR "moffett" OR "curtain sider")

("journeyman electrician" OR "master electrician" OR "commercial electrician" OR "industrial electrician") AND (commercial OR industrial OR "tenant improvement") AND (conduit OR "motor controls" OR PLC)

("project manager" OR "site manager" OR "construction manager") AND (construction OR "fit-out" OR "fit out" OR refurbishment) AND (SMSTS OR CSCS OR NEBOSH)

("account executive" OR "account manager" OR "business development manager" OR "sales executive") AND (SaaS OR "software as a service" OR "B2B software") AND (quota OR "president's club" OR "presidents club" OR "new business")

(CFO OR "chief financial officer" OR "finance director" OR "group FD" OR "group finance director") AND ("private equity" OR "PE-backed" OR "PE backed" OR "portfolio company" OR "sponsor-backed") AND (exit OR refinancing OR "buy and build" OR acquisition)

("recruitment consultant" OR "senior consultant" OR "principal consultant" OR "account manager" OR recruiter) AND (agency OR staffing OR "recruitment agency" OR "search firm") AND (billings OR "360" OR "full desk" OR "full-desk")

For executive search, strings are only the start of a target list; the executive search workflow shows how to map companies and calibrate before you approach anyone.

X-ray versions for Google

site:linkedin.com/in ("payroll manager" OR "payroll lead") CIPP (Manchester OR Salford OR Stockport) -jobs -job

(intitle:resume OR intitle:cv OR inurl:resume) ("data engineer" OR "analytics engineer") (Spark OR Databricks OR dbt) -job -jobs -template -sample -example

location:Berlin language:Rust followers:>20 type:user

GitHub’s user search qualifiers include location:, language:, followers: and repos:. A profile with a real name, a company and a few pinned projects tells you more than any keyword match. The sourcing guide covers how to approach developers found this way without being the fifth recruiter in their inbox that week.

The operators, in one minute

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Two rules apply almost everywhere:

1. Write operators in capitals. LinkedIn’s Boolean help article says they must be uppercase “for the search to work correctly”. In lowercase, many engines read “or” and “not” as ordinary words or drop them.
2. Wrap every OR group in brackets. java OR python AND aws means different things on different engines. (java OR python) AND aws means the same thing everywhere.

Build strings in blocks

Build a title block first, then add must-have skills one block at a time. Test each addition before considering exclusions.

How each platform treats Boolean

The same string can return very different results depending on where you paste it.

LinkedIn (free, Premium, Recruiter Lite, Recruiter, Sales Navigator)

LinkedIn’s Boolean help article documents quotes, round brackets, AND, OR and NOT. It evaluates them in this order: quotes, then brackets, then NOT, then AND, then OR. A few details catch people out:

• No wildcards. engineer* won’t match “engineering”. Write the variants out with OR.
• + and - aren’t officially supported. Use AND and NOT instead.
• Only round brackets group. Square and curly brackets are treated as ordinary characters.
• Stop words are ignored. Words like “by”, “in” and “with” are dropped, so "head of data" is safer in quotes.
• In Recruiter and Recruiter Lite, Boolean works inside the Keywords, Job titles and Companies fields, and the Must have / Can have / Doesn’t have options on filters behave like AND / OR / NOT (LinkedIn Recruiter help). Putting titles in the Job titles field is usually better than in Keywords, because Keywords also matches people who merely mention the title.
• Sales Navigator caps a query at 15 Boolean operators; Recruiter and Recruiter Lite have no published operator limit (LinkedIn help).

LinkedIn now offers AI-assisted search in Recruiter, which turns a job description or a plain-English request into filters. LinkedIn says you can still run Boolean searches alongside it. Treat the AI’s query as a first draft: open the generated filters, look at which titles it chose, and correct them.

If you search from a free account, LinkedIn applies a monthly commercial use limit to profile searches. It doesn’t publish the number, so heavy sourcers hit it without warning.

Google and Bing X-ray

X-ray search uses a general search engine to look inside one site. The basic form:

site:linkedin.com/in ("payroll manager" OR "payroll lead") CIPP Manchester

What to know in 2026:

• Google’s own search help now documents only a handful of operators: quotes, site:, - to exclude, before:, after: and filetype:. OR (in capitals), intitle:, inurl: and * inside quotes still work in practice, but they’re undocumented and can change.
• AND is implied in Google. Writing AND does no harm but does nothing.
• Use - for NOT in Google. -recruiter works; NOT recruiter is read as the word “not”.
• Several old operators are gone: + (removed in 2011, use quotes), ~ for synonyms (2013) and cache: (2024).
• AROUND(n) proximity has never been documented by Google and behaves inconsistently. Don’t build a search that depends on it.
• Bing’s advanced search options document AND, OR and NOT (capitalised), brackets and quotes, and its keyword list adds site:, intitle:, inbody: and loc:. Bing also notes that only the first 10 terms of a query are used, so keep Bing X-rays short.

X-ray results only show what the search engine has indexed, which is a fraction of any site. It’s a useful second look, not a replacement for the platform’s own search.

Job board CV databases

Most paid CV databases accept some form of Boolean, but each has its own rules. Indeed Smart Sourcing advertises “advanced filters and Boolean functionality” across its resume database. In the UK, Reed’s CV search listed 16,677,248 registered candidates when we checked in October 2026, and Totaljobs publishes its own guide to searching its CV database. In the US, Monster and CareerBuilder now operate as one business, with resume search sold through Monster’s hiring plans.

Before you rely on a board, check three things in its help pages: whether it supports brackets (some don’t, so complex nesting silently fails), whether it has a wildcard or “stemming” setting, and whether keyword search covers the full CV text or just the profile summary. The UK job boards guide and the job boards roundup cover which boards are worth paying for.

Your own ATS or CRM

This is where most agencies under-search. Many ATS and CRM search boxes are built on search engines like Elasticsearch or Lucene, which support Boolean, wildcards and even proximity ("data engineer"~3 finds “data platform engineer”). But vendors expose different subsets, and Elasticsearch’s own query documentation warns that its Boolean operators “do not honor the usual precedence rules”, which is another reason to bracket everything.

Structured filters often beat a long string here, because your database knows things a profile doesn’t: when you last spoke to the person, what they earn, their notice period, and which jobs they’ve been shortlisted for. In Longlist, for example, you combine keyword search over parsed CVs with filters for skills, title, company, location radius, tags and past pipeline stage.

When a database search finds people you have already spoken to, you can use that history to decide whom to approach first. The candidate sourcing guide explains why database-first sourcing should be the default, and the recruiting database page shows how Longlist parses and deduplicates CVs so they’re searchable in the first place.

Common mistakes that break searches

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From a good string to a shortlist

A string that returns 150 relevant people is a starting point, not a shortlist. What turns it into placements:

1. Check your database first. Run the same logic against your own records and see who you already know. They respond faster and you already have context.
2. Capture people properly. When you find someone on LinkedIn, save them to your CRM with the source and the job, not to a spreadsheet. A browser extension saves retyping; the Chrome extensions for recruiters roundup covers the options, including Longlist’s own extension.
3. Write outreach that shows you read the profile. Mention the specific experience your string was looking for. The recruitment email sequence templates include first-touch and follow-up messages.
4. Track what converts. Note which string and source each shortlisted candidate came from. After a month, the agency KPI scorecard will show which searches produce interviews, not just profiles.