Candidate Advanced Search with Keywords

Keywords can be used when performing a Candidate Advanced Search.

In earlier releases, when users used the candidate advanced search's Keywords field, the system searched a large number of Candidate Profile fields as well as the five most recently attached files (three attached by candidates and two attached by users). Now, system administrators can configure a setting that will determine the fields that will be searched when using the Keywords field in the Advanced Candidate Search form. The setting can be set to Optimal (default value) or Legacy. The Legacy value should only be chosen to revert to original list of profile fields used prior to 13C – primarily to include "comments" in keyword search.

The table shows the fields searched by the candidate advanced search's Keywords field whether the setting is set to Optimal or Legacy.

Fields searched when the setting is set to Optimal	Fields searched when the setting is set to Legacy
Personal information fields: first name last name middle initial employee number street address city phone numbers email address postal code	Personal information fields: first name last name middle initial employee number street address city phone numbers email address postal code
Text-based user-defined field answers.	Text-based user-defined field answers.
Pasted cover letter from the general profile.	Pasted cover letter from the general profile.
Pasted resume from the general profile.	Pasted resume from the general profile.
Career objectives from the general profile.	Career objectives from the general profile.
Additional information from the general profile.	Additional information from the general profile.
All file attachments from the candidate provided the attachments have one of the following supported file formats: .doc, .docx (Word) .txt (standard text file) .rtf (rich text format) .pdf (Adobe Portable Document Format) .htm or .html (hypertext markup language documents) .wpd (Word Perfect) .odt (if Oracle 11G is used)	The three most recent file attachments per candidate: .doc, .docx (Word) .txt (standard text file) .rtf (rich text format) .pdf (Adobe Portable Document Format) .htm or .html (hypertext markup language documents) .wpd (Word Perfect) .odt (if Oracle 11G is used)
The two most recent file attachments from users (displayed in the Attachments tab), limited to supported file format type.	The two most recent file attachments from users (displayed in the Attachments tab), limited to supported file format type.
Education [Institution, Program, Other institution, Other Program and text-based user defined fields] from the general profile.	Education (Other institution, Other Program and text-based user defined fields) from the general profile.
Work Experience (Employer, Job Function, Other Employer, Other Job Function, Achievements, and text-based user defined fields) from the general profile.	Work Experience (Other Employer, Other Job Function, Achievements, and text-based user defined fields) from the general profile.
Text-based answers to questions from the library.	Text-based answers to questions from the library.
	Comments (from the History tab).
	Source and event names.
	User name.

System administrators can also specify the types of attachments searched by the candidate advanced search's Keywords field:

all attachments
candidates visible attachments
attachments tagged as resumes

Keywords and Boolean Operators

Keyword search is considered to provide exact matches. However, if a user includes OR in a search query, the search engine looks of course for exact matches for one word or the other. Boolean operators are pretty straightforward but when a complex search query using multiple Boolean operators is incorrectly formulated, results are unpredictable. The Keywords search supports the following boolean operators:

Boolean Operator	Description
AND	By default, words entered in the Keywords field are linked (transparently) by the AND operator. If you searched for "product manager" (without the double quotation marks) or for "product and manager" (without the double quotation marks), the search results would be the same. The search engine would retrieve all candidates whose file contains both words (the words will not necessarily be next to each other).
OR	You can use the OR operator to change the default behavior (AND) or to build more complex queries. For example, if you searched for "competitor1 OR competitor2 OR competitor3" (without the double quotation marks), the system will retrieve candidates whose file contains at least one of the competitors' names.
NOT	You can use the NOT operator to exclude specific keywords from a query. For example, if you wanted to exclude from the search results candidates whose file contained the name of a specific company, but did refer to a specific competitor, you could search for "competitor1 NOT company1" (without the double quotation marks).
Parentheses	Operations enclosed in parentheses are performed before other operations. For example, a search query for candidates who worked as marketing or advertising consultants could look like the following: (market* or advertis) and (consult or agent or representative). The search engine would retrieve candidate files that satisfy the two conditions: Candidate files containing a word that begins with market or advertis such as market, markets, marketing, advertise, advertising, advertisement AND, Candidate files containing agent, representative, or a word beginning with consult such as agent, representative, consult, consults, consulting, consulted, consultant.
Wild Card	The wild card "" (asterisk) can be placed at the end of a word. For example, a search for comput will retrieve all words that begin with comput such as computer, computing, computers, computation. Wild cards within double quotation marks are not supported. Note: An update to the Lucene search server engine slightly modified the behavior when using the wild card * in the quick search, specific search, and advanced search. If the number of words returned by the query reaches 5000, no warning message will be displayed asking you to refine the search. Be aware that it might take a while for the search engine to return any result when the query is too generic. Also note that when performing a quick search using the wild card * at the beginning of a word, such request is heavier on the search server and you might have a longer response time.
Double quotation marks around strings	You can use double quotation marks to search for a specific string. For example, if you wanted to find product managers but not product specialists who are also assistant managers, you could type "product manager" (with the double quotation marks). Note: You need to type the double quotes in the Keywords field; do not copy them from other applications such as Word and paste them into the field. Also note that double quotes can vary from one keyboard language to another. If you use a French keyboard and use these «quotes», the search engine does not recognize them as double quotes in the Keywords field.

Keywords and Stop Words

Stop words are indexed in the Keywords field when doing an advanced candidate search. Stop words are small words not included in the index and excluded from a search because they are not considered to be significant. For example, words such as "no, not, the, one, and, or" and all single letters are stop words.

Stop words are considered by the system when placed within quotation marks or parenthesis. For example, when users are searching for "The Store" placed within quotation marks or parenthesis, the system will consider the stop word "the". When users are searching for The Store without quotation marks nor parenthesis, the system will ignore the stop word in the query.

Keywords and Special Characters

In general, special characters used as punctuation or separators are not included in the search index and cannot be used to retrieve information. This is the case for the following characters:

:
;
.
,
"
'
-
_
&
*

Note: Exception: When used in email and phone number fields, some special characters are supported. For example, john.smith@taleo.net is supported as is, because the system recognizes this is an email address.

Keywords and Exact Term

When you perform a Keywords search with Exact Term selected, words that match exactly the terms you entered are returned and highlighted. You can use the wild card *, quotation marks, parentheses, and Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to construct sophisticated candidate search queries. The system applies the AND operator between words.

Keywords and Related Terms

The OR operator is applied transparently when the Related Term option is selected. The search engine searches for occurrences of the word you entered but also searches for occurrences of related terms determined by the system. Such related terms might be particularly relevant to your search while other related terms might be less pertinent.

You should use the Related Terms feature when your initial query did not retrieve a lot of candidates. The Related Term feature enables you to retrieve candidates whose file contains a word that is similar in meaning to your search word in addition to candidates whose file contains your exact search word. In addition to retrieving similar words, it retrieves words with the same first 6 letters, since those words are most likely in the same family. For example, if you search for "Administration" using related terms, the engine will also search for "administrative", "administrator", etc.

Keywords and Conceptual Search

The conceptual option for the advanced search is available if your system administrator has activated the proper setting.

The conceptual search is an extension of the related term search, where instead of finding variations of entered words, the system automatically finds the right concepts to search for based on the text provided and then broaden its search. The conceptual search allows you to use large blocks of text (typically from a candidate's resume or a job description) to search for candidates. Conceptual search is typically the best tool to use when searching for candidates with attached files. This tool can be used when you are viewing a relatively large amount of text regarding particular sections of a candidate's resume such as experience and education, or a job description and you want to know if there are other candidates whose records contain similar information. For details, see Conceptual Search.

Keywords and Highlighting

Keyword highlighting is activated by your system administrator and is limited to Advanced Search results. Each occurrence of the keyword is highlighted in yellow on all tabs in the candidate file and in the attached files. Up to fifty different terms can be highlighted. A private setting is used to limit the number of highlighted words (contact Oracle Support for details). The search will highlight words together when the search keyword includes double quotes, to better match what is really retrieved by the search engine. For example, searching for "product manager" displays only candidates with "product manager" in their file. Words are highlighted throughout the entire candidate file, even the labels, so some of the highlighted words are not used to retrieve the candidates.

Note: When performing a candidate advanced search with the Keywords field, an entire word or 3 characters with a wild card (*) can be used as a keyword.