# People search

> Finding members by company, school, skill or meaning, the four starting questions, and why picking a sort turns the smart matching off.

Source: https://www.revquix.com/docs/getting-started/people-search
Last verified: 2026-09-05

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**If you are looking for people rather than services**, use [People](https://www.revquix.com/dashboard/people). It searches every member, not only mentors - which
is what makes it different from [Mentors](https://www.revquix.com/docs/mentorship/finding-a-mentor).

## Start with the question, not the filters

Four starting points sit above the results:

|                   | Searches                                     |
| ----------------- | -------------------------------------------- |
| **Everyone**      | Every discoverable member.                   |
| **Mentors**       | Only people who mentor.                      |
| **At my company** | People whose current employer matches yours. |
| **At my school**  | People who went where you went.              |

The last two read your own profile to work out what "my" means. If your profile has no employer or
school on it, they have nothing to match and will come back thin - fixing that is [experience and education](https://www.revquix.com/docs/account/experience-and-education).

## Filters

Current company, past company, school, skills, location, and years of experience. Plus three
switches: is a mentor, has open slots, is verified.

Past company is genuinely separate from current - "anyone who has ever worked at X" and "who works
at X now" are different searches, and the filter strip keeps them apart.

## Typing versus filtering

The search box understands meaning, not just words. "Backend people who have scaled payments" finds
profiles that describe that without using those exact terms.

> **Warning** - Choosing a sort turns the meaning-matching off
>
> Smart matching only runs on **Most relevant**, which is the default. Pick Most followers, Most
> experienced, Recently joined or Alphabetical and you get exactly that ordering over the filtered
> set, with no re-ranking on top.
>
> That is deliberate - an explicit sort is an instruction, and quietly re-ordering it by relevance
> would answer a question you did not ask. But it does mean a descriptive search plus a chosen sort
> is usually worse than either alone.

## Who you can find

Not everybody. Members control how findable they are, and the setting is honoured here rather than
just affecting ranking:

- Most people are **discoverable** and appear normally.
- Some are **findable by name only** - they will not turn up when you browse or filter, but they do
  turn up if you search their actual name or username.
- Some are **hidden** and do not appear in any search at all.

So an empty result for a person you know is on Revquix usually means their setting, not a bug. Their
profile still works if you have their link.

Your own setting is at [profile visibility](https://www.revquix.com/docs/account/profile-visibility).

## Following someone you find

Every result carries a follow control. What that does is [following people](https://www.revquix.com/docs/writing/following-people).

- [Profile visibility](https://www.revquix.com/docs/account/profile-visibility) - How findable you are.

- [Finding a mentor](https://www.revquix.com/docs/mentorship/finding-a-mentor) - When you want to book, not connect.

- [What is public](https://www.revquix.com/docs/account/what-is-public) - What a stranger sees when they arrive.