Filtering Out Categories of Jobs on LinkedIn
Want to change industries? Use keyword searches on LinkedIn.
I have been working in the defense industry for about 11 years, and I am interested in finding a job in a new industry. The problem is that the local software engineering scene is primarily made up of defense contracting companies. We have a few insurance and manufacturing companies around, but that severely limits my options. I am not opposed to working remotely and would actually prefer it after working remotely for the last year.
When you search for jobs on LinkedIn, there is often an Industry section with some keywords you can use in your search. LinkedIn used to have more features built into its job search where you could filter based on what was in this field, but it looks like they removed this feature.
Let’s assume you do not want to see the defense industry in your search results. Add “NOT defense” to your search!
software engineer NOT defenseThis kind of works.
LinkedIn used to let you filter on Industry, but for some reason, it is no longer available. Instead of filtering based on the Industry tags, you will be filtering out jobs that mention “defense” in their text.
Now that we have the basics down, we can try to get a little fancier. Cleverly has a post that provides some tips on how to search for jobs and candidates more efficiently. I recommend looking over this post to get more in-depth tips, but what I want to cover is discussed under the Boolean Search Commands section.
The NOT Boolean operator only works on the next token in your search, so if you enter something like software engineer NOT defense insurance the NOT not only doesn’t exclude insurance, but it also stops excluding defense for some reason. To fix this, the LinkedIn search supports multiple NOT statements, and it has parentheses functionality. Here is an example:
(software engineer) NOT (defense OR insurance)Here we use OR instead of AND because the search is performing a logical search, not an English search.
You might still have some companies within the industries you are trying to filter out at this point. I suggest adding more exclusions. Below I show a search that I have used to filter out the defense industry from my searches. It took me several more terms to stamp out a lot of false-positive search results.
(software engineer) NOT (defense OR ts OR sci OR secret OR warfighter)I hope this helps someone find a new job they like faster and prevents them from starting another job they don’t!
