Come out, come out, wherever you are. It’s that time again! Time for us to start searching! The long weekend is over – candidates have a case of the “Tuesdays” and our competitors are lethargic from turkey overloads. It is the perfect time to find those passive candidates!

Last week, we discussed the value of the Google Search syntax “inurl” for targeting resumes on the web. Now that you have had time to practice the “inurl” function, we are going to discuss another Google search syntax that will help you further target candidates resumes and online portfolios.

1) filetype: this allows you to identify the type of file you are looking for. It is extremely helpful when targeting resumes.

Example: filetype:doc (Java OR J2EE) (developer OR programmer)Toronto would produce results of Word documents that have Java OR J2EE AND developer OR programmer AND Toronto within the body or title of their document. This type of search can target resumes because resumes are often uploaded online in Word/Text documents.

You can also combine this syntax with your inurl syntax to further target resumes.

Example: inurl:resume filetype:doc (Java OR J2ee) (developer OR programmer) Toronto would produce results of webpages with resume in the URL which also have a Word document uploaded that has either Java OR J2ee AND developer OR programmer AND Toronto within the body or title of the document.

Other file types I have tried are: filetype:pdf filetype:docx filetype:txt

What other file types do you think would be useful to target?

Come back next Tuesday for some more Boolean search strings! Happy hunting!