Free tool
Boolean search generator for LinkedIn and X-ray
Type the job title, the skills and the words to leave out. The tool writes the LinkedIn Boolean string, the Google X-ray string and the plain-English brief as you type. It runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere. Below it, the rules of Boolean search in five minutes, and the mistakes that empty a result page.
Armin Barimani, co-founder of Kretsia
Last updated
The generator
Describe the role.
Get three strings.
Separate terms with commas. Put spellings of the same thing on one line with a spaced slash: React / React.js. Or load an example.
The strings appear here as you type. Start with a job title.
LinkedIn Boolean string
Paste into the keyword box on LinkedIn or Recruiter. Set location and other filters in the sidebar.
Google X-ray string
Paste into Google. It searches public LinkedIn profiles without a LinkedIn seat.
The brief in plain English
What you would say on the phone. A brief like this is what Kretsia reads instead of a string.
What is Boolean search?
Boolean search is a way of writing a search so that the engine combines words the way you meant them: this AND that, this OR that, this but NOT that. Three operators, two kinds of brackets. A recruiter uses it to pull a list of profiles out of LinkedIn, a job board or Google that a plain keyword box would miss or drown.
A good string is a sentence with the small words removed. "A senior front-end developer in London who has used React and TypeScript, ideally GraphQL, and is not a recruiter" becomes ("Senior Frontend Developer" OR "Senior React Developer") AND React AND TypeScript AND GraphQL NOT recruiter. The generator above does the removing for you.
LinkedIn Boolean search: the rules
LinkedIn's keyword box, in the free search, Sales Navigator and Recruiter, reads Boolean with a few house rules that trip people up.
- Operators in capitals. AND, OR and NOT must be upper case. Lower-case or is treated as a word to search for.
- Straight quotes for phrases. "product manager". Curly quotes pasted from a document break the phrase.
- Parentheses for groups. LinkedIn reads NOT first, then AND, then OR, so brackets decide what you get. Put every OR group in its own pair.
- No wildcard. develop* does nothing useful on LinkedIn. Write the variants out: (developer OR engineer OR programmer).
- Filters, not keywords, for location. Typing "London" into the keyword box finds people who wrote London anywhere, including a university from 2009. Set the location in the filter and keep the string for what people do.
- Keep it short. The keyword box has a length limit. If a string runs past a few lines, split it into two searches rather than one that loses its tail.
X-ray search: LinkedIn profiles through Google
An X-ray search asks Google for public LinkedIn profiles that match your words, so you can search without a LinkedIn seat and without LinkedIn's commercial-use limit. The trick is one operator: site:linkedin.com/in, which restricts results to profile pages. The generator writes the rest in Google's dialect.
- Google's AND is a space. React TypeScript already means both. Writing AND is harmless but unnecessary.
- OR stays in capitals, and works best inside parentheses: ("Frontend Engineer" OR "Frontend Developer").
- NOT is a minus sign stuck to the word: -recruiter, -"talent acquisition".
- Drop the directory pages. -inurl:dir keeps LinkedIn's name-directory listings out of the results.
- Location goes in as words. Google has no location filter, so London or ("Greater London" OR London) sits in the string.
What comes back is whatever the person has made public, which is often the headline, the current title and a few lines. It is enough to find names; it is not enough to tell whether someone meets a requirement, which is the limit of every string.
Common mistakes that empty the result page
- Too many ANDs. Every AND halves the pool. Six must-haves against profiles that mention three of them on average returns nobody. Put the two real must-haves in with AND and the rest in one OR group.
- One spelling. "Front-end", "frontend" and "front end" are three strings to LinkedIn. So are "ReactJS" and "React.js". The slash in the generator's fields is for exactly this.
- Job titles only. The person you want may call themselves "Software Engineer" and never write "frontend". Search for the skills and the work, and treat the title as one OR group among several.
- Forgetting NOT. Every string for a sales role returns the recruiters who hire for it. NOT (recruiter OR "talent acquisition" OR headhunter) is the most used clause in sourcing.
- Trusting the count. A string that returns 2,000 people has found 2,000 people who used your words. It has not told you which of them has done the job. That reading still has to be done by someone, one profile at a time.
Skip the Boolean. Write the brief.
The third box in the generator is the one to keep. A Boolean string returns everyone who used your words and cannot tell you which of the 40 actually ran a team. The plain-English brief is what a colleague would understand, and it is what Kretsia reads: paste the brief or the client's job ad, confirm the requirements as must-have or nice-to-have, and get 30 people from public profiles worldwide with every requirement marked met, partial or missing and the line from the profile that proves it. No quote, no tick. The free plan is 90 credits a month, about three searches, no card, so the comparison is cheap to run: the same role as a string, and as a brief.
FAQ
Questions about Boolean strings.
Yes, with no sign-up. It runs entirely in your browser: the strings are built from the form on this page and nothing you type is sent to a server or kept. Kretsia AB publishes it because recruiters who write good briefs are recruiters who get something out of Kretsia; the tool itself is separate from the product.
The operators are the same: AND, OR, NOT in capitals, quotes for phrases, parentheses for groups, no wildcard. What differs is where the string is read. Recruiter and Sales Navigator let you aim it at specific fields such as title or company; the free search reads the whole profile and caps how many searches you run a month on commercial use. The same string returns a different pool in each.
Google only sees what a person has made public, and it indexes a fraction of profiles. Three fixes, in order: drop a must-have, add spellings with OR, and remove the location words to see whether they were the constraint. If the count is still small, the pool is small and no string will change that.
No. LinkedIn does not support the asterisk, so the variants have to be written out in an OR group: (developer OR engineer OR programmer). Google does not use the asterisk as a word stem either; it stands in for a whole missing word inside a quoted phrase.
Keep the Boolean. The string's job ends at the list; the reading of 40 profiles against the requirements is still yours. A brief pasted into Kretsia comes back as 30 people with each requirement marked met, partial or missing and the sentence from the profile behind the mark, which is the part the string cannot do. Run the same role both ways on the free plan and compare the two lists.
The LinkedIn string is standard Boolean, so most CV databases and ATS keyword searches read it as written. Check two things in the system you paste it into: whether operators must be in capitals, and whether it supports parentheses. If it supports neither, run the OR groups as separate searches.
Skip the Boolean.
Write the brief.
Paste the third box, or the client's job ad, into Kretsia. Thirty people back, every requirement quoted. Free plan: 90 credits a month, about three searches, no card.