Law Enforcement, Learn to Conduct Online Search Like Recruitment
Law Enforcement can conduct online searches like a professional Tech Recruiter! Why would this be useful? Well, punching basic searches into Google doesn’t always yield what we’re looking for. Who has time to dig through thousands of pages? I know time is very important for law enforcement and detective work.
These are some digital information facts to show you how much clutter there is to sift through:
547,200 new websites are created globally every day
More than 120 new professionals join Linkedin every minute
There are over 27 million Tweets every hour
Over 67 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day
There are 5 new profiles created on Facebook every second
1.5 billion people are active on Facebook every day
300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
All of this content is searchable on Google, Bing and other search engines! You don’t need to be on Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram etc to have this content show up in your google searches… if you know how to find it.
So, what do I do that’s so special? It’s called Boolean Search. Not all recruiters know this skill-set, but it’s a highly competitive edge for the ones that do. Linkedin Recruiter (a software sold by Linkedin to recruitment teams) has enabled Recruiters to develop this essential skill-set.
I actually started my career in Recruitment without knowing how to conduct a Boolean search. I frankly never even heard of it. Then, I was hired as a Contract Recruiter at Google and to my surprise, Google invested greatly in the training of all their Recruiters… even the Contract Recruiters. In a two hour session, I learned everything that would change my abilities to really find the talent I was looking for online.
I’ve attended many networking events and recruitment events where there were no successful connections made for any hires at that time, or in the future. With Boolean, there’s no time wasted and no need to leave my desk. Networking events can occasionally be great and effective, but they’re like throwing a large net into the ocean and hoping to catch a whale. With Boolean Search, I have the exact GPS coordinates of around 95% of the world’s whales.
So, what is Boolean Search? Boolean search is a type of search allowing users to combine keywords with operators or modifiers such as AND, NOT and OR to produce more relevant results. In the case I’m talking about, Boolean is being used to produce more relevant search or search engine results (or Linkedin Search results).
For example, a Boolean search could be “Criminal Record” AND “San Francisco”; This would limit the search results to those searches containing those two keywords or phrases.
Founded by George Boole, Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age. Boolean logic is a computer science fundamental, but anyone can learn it in a couple hours at most.
Back to my argument for law enforcement, when I conduct boolean searches to explore if it’s a widely used technique in investigations and detective work, I don’t see anything indicating it is.
I think Boolean Logic has been overlooked by law enforcement and private investigators in many cases. Why do I think this? Outside of my own search not indicating otherwise, police officers, detectives, and law enforcement in general are field agents or desk clerks with traditional pen and paper work. They can be technically savvy, but typically aren’t trained to be that way.
If I’m married to a Software Engineer with degrees from MIT and UPenn, and Boolean Search never came up for the first 5 years we were together, even though it’s widely used in Recruitment, Law Enforcement has to be missing this opportunity.
The internet is only going to get larger and harder to navigate. There’s this saying “The best place to bury a body is on the second page of google.” I think it possible you police officers out there may not know where the dead bodies are hiding on the internet. ;)
I’ve been coaching Recruitment professionals (junior and those that want to learn Boolean) and if my instincts are right and you managed to find this article (not likely on page one of Google because SEO is not my thing… lol) reach out. I’ll show you how to never look on page two again.
