What is boolean search, and why do recruiters move past it?
Boolean search finds profiles by combining keywords with operators like AND, OR and NOT. It's precise but brittle: it only finds people who used your exact words, so recruiters spend hours maintaining strings and still miss qualified candidates who describe their work differently.
Boolean was the professional skill of the sourcing generation that grew up on LinkedIn Recruiter, and a well-built string still beats a lazy one. The problem is structural: language varies more than skills do.
Modern practice keeps boolean thinking (clear must-haves, clean exclusions) and hands the language problem to semantic systems, which read intent instead of characters.