How to find free resumes on Scribd (part 2)

Posted by Jim Stroud

August 6, 2008

In my last post, I discussed Scribd which is (for lack of a better comparison), the “YouTube” of online documents.

Now I want to show you another way to research Scribd for resumes by using the Scribd search operators. Here is a quick cheatsheet for your review.

You can search between a choice of keywords on a document using the “OR” command. For example…

resume | CV

If you add 2 or more words in a search string, the AND operator is implied. So no need to really use it unless you just want to. The AND operator in Scribd is the ampersand symbol. (&) For example…

java & perl

If you do not want certain keywords in your result, then use the minus sign (-) or the exclamation point (!) as they both do the same thing. In other words, they are the NOT operators. For example…

-oracle

If you are looking for exact phrases, surround the terms you want with quotes. For example…

“software engineer”

You can all use what Scribd describes as a proximity operator (”~”) to search for a group of words within a certain distance of each other. For example to search for the words vista, developer and Microsoft, all within a span of less than 10 words:

“vista developer microsoft” ~10

The quorum operator (”/”) can be used to do “fuzzy matching” when an exact match is not necessary. For example, If you would like to find resumes that have at least three of the five words C#, ajax, HTML, javascript, CSS and design; then use the following search string.

“C# ajax html javascript CSS design”/3

If you want to restrict your searches to how a document is titled, then use the command “@title.” For example, if I wanted to do a search for documents with “Resume” in the title, I would use the query…

@title “resume”

People use “tags” (another term for keywords) to describe their documents. If you want to search Tags, use the “@tags” command. For instance, if I wanted to find documents that people have described as “resume,” I would search this way…

@tags “resume”

If I wanted to search the content of the document itself, I would use the “@cropped_text” command. For example, if I wanted to find the word resume on a document, I would search…

@cropped_text “resume”

Finally, if I wanted to search the descriptions of the various documents on Scribd, which is how people detail what the document is all about; I would use the “@description” command. For example, if I wanted to look for the term resume in the description of Scribd documents, I would search this way…

@description resume

SPECIAL NOTE: The OR operator is more important to SCRIBD than the AND operator, so “looking for resume | cv | vitae” means that you are looking for the keywords resume OR CV OR vitae and not looking for resume and the word CV or Vitae. Get it?

SPECIAL NOTE #2: Its cool to use parentheses in a search, but you can not use the NOT command (which is the minus sign or the exclamation point) inside the parentheses. It just won’t work. Sorry.

Okay, with all that being said, let’s do a few searches using these fancy search commands.

Okay, assuming that I have you sufficiently intrigued with resume searching on Scribd, let me show you one last trick you can do with it. As you might have noticed, at the top of the bar is a “Groups” link.

Clicking that link will you bring you to the “Groups” page. (Wow! You did not see that one coming, huh?)

From the Groups homepage you can do a search for groups of all sorts where people congregate around certain types of documents. A search on C++ Programming returned 117 C++ Programming groups. If these are the types of people you are looking for, what better place to be?