Campaign job criteria

Recruitment Marketing Public

Job criteria in Recruitment Marketing is grouped into two categories:

  • Explicit fields
  • Non-explicit fields

An explicit field uses the "=" symbol, and requires the job criteria to be formatted as follows:

city = “Dublin"

In Recruitment Marketing, the following fields are explicit only:

  • title
  • description
  • department
  • category
  • employment_type
  • level
  • remote_job e.g. yes or no
  • city
  • state
  • country_code e.g. IE, US
  • country e.g. United States
  • postal_code
  • ats_integration_uid

A non-explicit (or implicit) field is more akin to a keyword search e.g. "924123"

Note: As of March 2023, the only non-explicit field in Recruitment Marketing is ats_uid. This change was made to reduce the large number of invalid and inefficient criteria being used. For example, a criteria such as city = new york previously translated into a query which searched for all jobs with a city equal to new and all jobs which had any field containing the phrase york. This produced very misleading results and was also slowing down page load times. With the recent changes made to jobs criteria, no results will be returned for this incorrect query. The correct version would be city = "new york", which produces an accurate result with an efficient page load time.

Complex Criteria

You can create more complex job criteria by adding any of the following operators:

  • contains (~)
  • not contains  (!~)
  • in (^)
  • not in (!^)
  • or
  • and

For example, to pull in all jobs where city contains Dublin, the criteria would look like this:

city ~ Dublin

If you’d like to exclude all Dublin jobs from your results, the criteria would be, does not contain: city !~ “Dublin" and would look like this:

city !~ “Dublin"



To include jobs from a range of cities use the ^ operator e.g: 

city ^ (dublin, cork, "New York") 

To exclude jobs from a range of cities use the !^ operator e.g: 

city !^ (dublin, cork, "New York") 

To create a more varied list of jobs, try a “this or that” criteria. For example, all jobs in Dublin or Texas, the construct would be as follows:

city = dublin or state = Texas 

To create a more specific list of jobs, use “and.” For example, where city is Dublin and all the jobs contain “rails” in their title, the construct would be as follows:

city = dublin and title ~ rails



Note: Where a field is not specified, the system will default to searching the job title and no other fields for a match. For example, in the case of [title ~ "aaa" or "bbb"], while the intention translates as [title contains "aaa" or "bbb"], what the system actually reads is, [title contains "aaa" or "bbb" is found in any of the fields listed above.]

This is why it's important to qualify each criteria component, i.e. title ~ "aaa" or title ~"bbb"

More Accurate Criteria

Quotation marks

If the search value has spaces in it e.g. "New York" or "Business Analyst", then it is required to wrap the value in quotation marks. A criteria without the use of quotation marks such as city = New York will search for all jobs with a city of New and any jobs with an ATS uid of York

Inaccurate: city = New York

Accurate: city = "New York"

Specify keywords

As mentioned before category = Finance or Sales will actually check for jobs with a category of Finance and a title of Sales

Inaccurate: category = Finance or Sales

Accurate: category ^ ("Finance", "Sales")

Use parenthesis when mixing operators

Consider this query:

category = Finance and city = Dublin or category = Sales and state = "New York"

It is ambiguous whether the intention of the author is:

category = Finance and (city = Dublin or category = Sales) and state = "New York"

or

(category = Finance and city = Dublin) or (category = Sales and state = "New York")

These two queries will produce different results. For that reason, it is better to explicitly use parenthesis when mixing and and or

Efficient Criteria

Avoid unnecessary usage of or

Slower: city = Dublin and (category = "Finance" or category = "Sales" or category = "Business")

Faster: city = Dublin and category ^ ("Finance", "Sales", "Business")

Prefer equals to contains

If contains (~) is not needed, then using equals (=) will produce a faster page load time

Slower: city ~ Dublin

Faster: city = Dublin

Avoid multiple usages of not contains

Assume there are jobs connected to the following categories: "Business development", "Business Analyst", "Sales experts", "Technical Sales"

Very slow: category !~ Business and category !~Sales

Faster: category !^ ("Business development", "Business Analyst", "Sales experts", "Technical Sales")

While the faster query is longer to write, it is better to use !^ and list all of the explicit categories