Boolean search string for Sales Development Representative
Copy-paste strings to source Sales Development Representative candidates, plus the title synonyms, skills and exclusions they are built from. Adapt the terms to your market before running them.
LinkedIn search
("sales development representative" OR sdr OR "business development representative" OR bdr OR "inside sales representative" OR "lead generation specialist") AND "cold calling" AND "outbound prospecting" AND "lead qualification" AND (salesforce OR "outreach sequences" OR "email cadences" OR "linkedin sourcing" OR "crm hygiene" OR "discovery questions" OR "objection handling" OR "b2b saas" OR outbound OR "pipeline generation" OR "sales cadence" OR quota) NOT (recruiter OR intern OR internship OR "customer service" OR retail)Paste into the LinkedIn people-search box. LinkedIn supports AND, OR, NOT and quoted phrases.
Google X-ray
site:linkedin.com/in ("sales development representative" OR sdr OR "business development representative" OR bdr OR "inside sales representative" OR "lead generation specialist") "cold calling" "outbound prospecting" "lead qualification" (salesforce OR "outreach sequences" OR "email cadences" OR "linkedin sourcing" OR "crm hygiene" OR "discovery questions" OR "objection handling" OR "b2b saas" OR outbound OR "pipeline generation" OR "sales cadence" OR quota) -recruiter -intern -internship -"customer service" -retailPaste into Google. It searches public LinkedIn profiles without LinkedIn Recruiter — add a location in quotes to narrow it.
Terms behind the Sales Development Representative string
| Job titles | sales development representative · sdr · business development representative · bdr · inside sales representative · lead generation specialist |
|---|---|
| Core skills | cold calling · outbound prospecting · lead qualification · salesforce · outreach sequences · email cadences · linkedin sourcing · crm hygiene · discovery questions · objection handling |
| Nice to have | b2b saas · outbound · pipeline generation · sales cadence · quota |
| Excluded | recruiter · intern · internship · customer service · retail |
Sourcing notes
- Start broad, then narrow. If a string returns under ~20 profiles, drop the nice-to-have group before you drop titles.
- Exclusions cut noise but also cut real candidates — check a few excluded profiles before trusting a NOT clause.
- Titles vary by company size: what reads as senior at a startup can be mid-level at an enterprise. Read the profile, not the label.
Build a custom Boolean string → · Interview scorecard for a Sales Development Representative →
Frequently asked questions
What should an SDR interview scorecard measure?
Weight the funnel evidence highest: activity, connect and reply rates, meetings booked, and how many of those meetings closers accepted. Then score account research, outreach craft, live objection handling, qualification discipline, and coachability. Anchors matter more here than anywhere, because SDR interviews reward candidates who sound energetic rather than candidates who produced pipeline.
What interview questions separate a strong SDR from a weak one?
Ask for the funnel one step at a time and ask for the opener word for word. Strong candidates recite their own messaging, know their connect and reply rates, and can say how many booked meetings the closer rejected. Weak candidates report only meetings booked and describe outreach as whatever the template said.
How do you compare SDR candidates whose targets were different?
Compare conversion rates rather than raw meeting counts, since quota, segment, and lead flow differ by company. Score every candidate against the same anchors so a rep from a low-volume enterprise team is not penalized against a high-volume one. Recording the evidence behind each score, with the numbers the candidate actually gave, keeps that comparison auditable later.
When the stakes are a real hire, use evidence
These tools are quick heuristics. Verdict reads the CV against your job description and scores six dimensions with verbatim quotes as evidence — a hiring document you can defend.