People filters

This page walks through every filter in People Search, group by group. For the basics of running a search, start with People search.

​

How filters work together

A few behaviors apply across the whole panel and explain most “why did I get these results?” questions:

• Filters combine with AND. Each filter you add narrows the results. Within a single filter, multiple values usually broaden it (match any of them), unless you flip that filter’s AND/OR switch.
• Employment filters look for one matching role. When you combine several employment-related filters, HelloSky looks for a single job that satisfies them together. Job Title “CFO” plus Asset Class “Private - PE-Backed” finds people who were the CFO of a PE-backed company, not people who were a CFO somewhere and separately worked at a PE-backed company. This is almost always what you want, and it is why results feel precise.
• The live count is your feedback loop. The search button updates with the matching-people count as you edit. Add filters one at a time and you can see exactly which criterion narrows the pool.
• Filter hints. When a search comes back small (under 500 people), a sidebar shows how many people each active filter is excluding, so you can see which one to relax.
• Pinning. Every filter has a pin icon. Pinned filters appear in a “Pinned Filters” section at the top of the panel, and the arrangement is remembered for you.
• Finding a filter. The search box at the top of the panel filters the panel itself; type “tenure” to jump straight to Title Tenure.
• Missing something? The Request a filter link at the bottom of the panel goes straight to us.

​

Current, Past, or Current Or Past

Most employment filters have a scope dropdown with three options: Use Past deliberately: searching past titles (“was a VP of Engineering”) finds people ready for a step up, while Current finds people already in the seat.

​

Semantic Expansion

Job Title, Company Text, Skills, and Profile Text each have a Semantic Expansion checkbox. Checked, your term is expanded to similar concepts using AI (“CRO” also finds “Chief Revenue Officer” and close variants); unchecked, only exact matches return. Expansion is per-term and shows you the expanded variants it added.

​

Boolean expressions

Job Title and Sector support full Boolean expressions via their Boolean button:

• Quote multi-word phrases: "Chief Revenue Officer"
• Group with parentheses: ("CRO" OR "Chief Revenue Officer") AND "SaaS"
• NOT binds tightly: A OR B NOT C reads as A OR (B NOT C)
• Wildcards: *Energy* matches “Renewable Energy”
• Operators are case-insensitive

​

Job Titles

• Job Title: search by title or role, scoped Current/Past/Current Or Past, with Semantic Expansion and Boolean support. This is the workhorse filter; start here.
• Exclude Founders: removes people whose current role is founder. Useful when a title search like “CEO” keeps returning founders of two-person startups.

​

Locations

• Location: pick a city, state, or country. For cities, choose a radius: None for exact-city matches only, or 5 to 250 miles (default 50) to include nearby cities. View on Map previews your selection.
• Expanded matching: some profiles only carry a state- or country-level location. Checked, a city search also includes those people (a “San Francisco” search includes people only known to be “California”); unchecked, you get only people matched to the city itself. Off by default: turn it on when your pool feels thin, off when presence in the city matters.
• Nearby Locations: click Suggest Nearby for AI-suggested neighboring metros to add with one click.

​

Companies

• Company: people who work (or worked) at specific companies.
• Exclude Companies: removes anyone who has ever worked at these companies, current or past; the usual tool for off-limits lists.
• Company SmartTag: specialized industry tags such as disease areas, therapeutics, or technology domains, for targeting sharper than sector-level.
• Current Company Revenue ($M) and Current Company Headcount: filter by the company’s size today, regardless of when the person joined. Headcount uses standard bands (1-10 up to 10,000+).
• Funding Stage Experience: the person was working at the company during that funding round (Seed through Series H). “Series B” means they were there when the Series B happened, which is how you find operators with real early-stage scar tissue.
• Company Investors: filter by the investors backing the company, with an AND/OR toggle for requiring all versus any of them.
• Included / Excluded Company Lists: point the search at (or away from) your saved company lists, such as a Beacon market map or an off-limits list.

​

Sectors

• Sector: the company’s industry, with three refinements: the Primary sector only checkbox (checked: only companies whose main business is that sector; unchecked: primary or secondary), the AND/OR toggle, and full Boolean expressions.
• Related Sectors: click Suggest Related for adjacent sectors worth adding.
• Company Text: free-text search over company descriptions, products, and technologies, with Semantic Expansion. The tool for niches with no sector label yet.
• Customer Sector: the industries the company sells to, not the one it belongs to. A payments company selling to restaurants: Sector FinTech, Customer Sector Hospitality.
• Company Type: Product/Manufacturing versus Services businesses.
• Domains: B2B versus B2C.

​

Experience

• Career Years of Experience: total years of professional experience, min and max.
• Title Tenure (years): how long someone held a role, in decimal years (1.5 = 18 months). For current roles, measured from start date to today; for past roles, start to end. Great for filtering out job-hoppers or finding people due for a move.
• Department: functional area (Engineering, Finance, Sales, Marketing, Operations, Human Resources, Legal, Product & Design, and more).
• Seniority Level: from Board Member and C-Level (CXO) through SVP/EVP, Managing Director/Partner, VP, Senior Director, Director, Head of, GM, Manager, Advisor, and Individual Contributor. Combine with Department for “senior finance people” without guessing title strings.

​

Skills

• Skills: specific technical or professional skills (e.g., Java, Machine Learning), with an AND/OR toggle and Semantic Expansion.
• Smart Tag: curated skill and technology-domain tags, picked from a browser rather than free text.
• Languages: spoken languages, 100+ options, with AND/OR.

​

Education

• Degree: Bachelors, Masters, PhD, MD, MBA, JD.
• Major: field of study, free text.
• School: university or institution, with autocomplete; common aliases are matched (searching “Wharton” behaves the way you would hope).

​

Diversity

• Gender: Female, Male, or Other. “Other” includes people whose gender is not recorded.

​

Asset Class

Filter by the ownership of the company where the person works or worked, scoped Current/Past/Current Or Past:

• Public: publicly traded.
• Private: any privately held company.
• Private - PE-Backed: has private equity investors.
• Private - PE-Primary: the primary owner is a private equity firm.
• Private - VC-Backed: has venture capital investors.

This is the filter behind briefs like “must have operated in a PE-backed environment”: scope it to Past and the results have already done that tour.

​

Scale

Scale answers “what size company have they actually operated at?” using the company’s size during the person’s employment, not its size today. Toggle between Revenue and Headcount mode:

• Revenue When Employed ($M): the company’s revenue range while they were there (slider from $0 to $100B+).
• Grew Revenue From → To ($M): they joined when revenue was around the “from” value and grew it to around the “to” value. Example: $10M → $100M finds executives who took a company through that arc. Matching is deliberately approximate (roughly ±25% at each end), because real careers do not land on round numbers; this filter also focuses on Director-level and above.
• Headcount When Employed: same idea for team size, in standard bands.
• Scaled Team From → To: joined at ~50 employees, grew it to ~500. Same approximate matching.

​

Impact

• Exit Type: people who have been through at least one exit as an executive: IPO (took a company public), M&A (their company was acquired or merged), or Buy-Side M&A (executed acquisitions from the buy side).
• Total Post-Hire Funding (millions): the total funding the company raised after the person joined. A proxy for “investors kept backing the company on this person’s watch”.

​

ATS Talent Rediscovery

This group appears only when your organization has an ATS connected (Clockwork, Invenias, Gem, Ezekia, or Thrive; set up under Settings → Connection Paths).

• In [your ATS]: three options: Both (default, no effect), Yes (only people already in your ATS: rediscover candidates you already know), No (only people not in your ATS: net-new names). Matching is scoped to your organization’s own synced records.

​

Name & Profile

• Name: find a specific person by full or partial name; small misspellings are tolerated.
• Profile Text: free-text search across the whole profile: bio, headline, skills, interests, certifications, patents, and publications, plus job titles, employer names, and locations. Supports AND/OR and Semantic Expansion, and NOT terms exclude a person no matter where the term appears. This is the catch-all when no structured filter fits: “battery chemistry”, “FDA approval”, “grid-scale”.

---

Still unsure what a filter will do? Add it and watch the live count, check the filter-hint sidebar, or ask us. If the filter you need does not exist, use Request a filter at the bottom of the panel.