Boolean Searches
- Laura Coumbe
- Jul 17
- 5 min read
What the heck is a Boolean search?
BOO-lee-an No. Not a poltergeist on a health kick, before you ask.
Named after the English mathematician and logician George Boole, whose algebraic and logical systems are used in all modern digital computers.
YAWN.
BUT WAIT!
Before you click away, have you been applying to jobs, but you keep getting ghosted?
If you’re not sure how Boolean search terms work, it could be affecting your job search strategy.
Let’s get into it.
What is it, and why does it matter?
The precise definition, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is:
Boolean
adjective [before noun]
Used to describe a method of searching on a computer using terms such as 'and', 'not', and 'or', which are known as Boolean operators:
Could you put that in English, please, Laura?
Put simply, Boolean searches help recruiters narrow down thousands of candidates across LinkedIn, their ATS (Applicant Tracking System), ArtStation, and other internal databases or recruiting tools.
For example, let’s say that a recruiter at a large VFX studio was looking to hire Junior FX artists for their studio in Vancouver, Canada.
They might search for Junior FX artist AND Vancouver.
And bingo!
Up pop all of the people who fit that criterion.
AND is just the start. Recruiters may also use OR and NOT too, and they're just as handy to know about.
Say the same recruiter wants a Junior FX artist AND Vancouver, but they don't mind if you call yourself an FX artist, an FX TD, or an FX Technical Director, because some studios use different job titles for the same role.
That's where OR comes in: FX artist, OR FX TD, OR FX Technical Director. Any of those terms will pull you into the results.
Then there's NOT. Same search, but the recruiters have enough candidates who only know Blender. So they search for FX artists AND Vancouver, NOT Blender, to filter those candidates straight out.
Point being, your profile can get pulled in by an OR, or filtered out by a NOT, and you won't know which one's happened. All the more reason to make sure your titles and skills cover the bases.
So what happens if you don’t have your location or your job title on your LinkedIn, online art portfolio, resume or personal website?
You might not appear in those searches. You’ll likely get buried under the people who do have Boolean search criteria in mind.
You’ll increase your chances of being found in a Boolean search if you bear the following in mind.
First, on your Resume, ArtStation, LinkedIn, or anywhere you can list a location, list the nearest major city to you and the Province. Towns like Burnaby become:
Langley, Surrey, Burnaby = Vancouver, BC
Laval, Longueuil, Brossard = Montréal, QC
Mississauga, Milton, Oakville = Toronto, ON
But Laura, I don’t live in Canada!
All good, let’s list them like this:
Richmond, Guildford, Watford = London, UK
Potsdam, Köpenick = Berlin, Germany
Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye = Paris, France
San Mateo, Walnut Creek = San Francisco, CA
Alpharetta, Roswell = Atlanta, GA
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that for cities, towns or suburbs located in the USA, I have noted the State as well. This is important for tax purposes. Most countries have tax rebates and credits for VFX and Games productions. Read more about tax credits here.
Why this matters
In-person jobs.
Recruiters will likely search for candidates near their offices when the role is hybrid or in-office. This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Remote jobs.
Recruiters could search for the city where the role is based. However, they are more likely to search for the Province, State, Region and/or Country where the role is based, even though the role is remote. All of this is for tax purposes. Studios can’t claim tax credits if the candidate doesn’t live in the place where the job is posted.
What’s in a name?
So that's location sorted. But Boolean search isn't just about where you live; it's about what your title heading is too, because guess what? The same search terms are used to narrow down the results based on the keywords in your profile.
Out-of-date job titles (gah, I see this all the time!) Student at XYZ School, Recent Graduate, or a job title that’s far too broad is also tripping you up.
Be mindful of the title heading on your LinkedIn and your online profiles. Especially the first 8 words, because they appear as a preview of your profile.
But Laura, what should my title heading be?
“Michael always says K-I-S-S. Keep it simple, stupid. Great advice… hurts my feelings every time” - Dwight Schrute, The Office.
A resource I really like is J.T. O’Donnell. I have rounded up her key points about Boolean searches.
Your headline is prime real estate for matching those searches. Whatever key skill terms a recruiter types into their search, if those same terms sit in your headline, you're far more likely to turn up in results, and the more matching keywords you've got there, the higher you'll rank. LinkedIn
Her method for working out which terms to use: pull 5 to 10 job postings you're a strong match for, dump the text into a word cloud tool to see which hard and soft skills come up most often, then take the top 10 to 12 and weave them into your headline and Resume in the right spots. LinkedIn
There's also a more recent post from her (October 2025 onwards) about a LinkedIn algorithm change that's affected how recruiters find people. She reckons a lot of jobseekers are getting overlooked because of a handful of habits, including having too "clever" a headline that buries the useful keywords rather than surfacing them.
Remember - for the love of finding a great job as painlessly as possible, be consistent across all of your sites and documents, and make sure you update them regularly.
Wrapping up
So, to bring it all together: Boolean search isn't some clever bit of recruiter wizardry you need a computer science degree to understand. It's just AND, OR and NOT, doing the sorting for busy recruiters who've got thousands of profiles to wade through. Your job is to make sure you're one of the ones that surfaces. That means your location needs to say Vancouver, not Burnaby. Your headline needs to say what you actually do, in the keywords recruiters are actually typing, not a job title that's gone stale or a tagline that's trying too hard to be clever.
Small fixes, but they're the difference between showing up on page one and getting buried on page thirty, next to the profiles nobody's ever going to scroll to.
Get your Boolean search strategy sorted, and you won't be the one left ghosted.
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