People Search Property not showing up

Question

So this concerns SharePoint 2016 on Premise. I have MySite and searching from MySite triggers a people search. I want to search a department number. Example, in the people search, I enter...

1347

That number matches that of a department that I am member of. If I execute that search, I get 2 or 3 results (none of which relates to my department number).

The crawled property in question is People:DepartmentNumber and this is linked to a custom managed property called "deptNum"

If in the search I execute...

deptNum:1347

This will give me 14 results, showing me each of the members in my department. This is a great result.

My question is why is it when I search 1347, I get 3 bad results, when I search deptNum:1347 I get 14 good results. I would like for users to just be able to type the department number and get results where the department number matches for the employees. I cannot expect the employees to know the managed properties names.

Some additional information on the managed property...

DeptNum:

• Searchable: Yes
• Queryable: Yes
• Retrievable: Yes
• Refinable: Yes - active

Some additional information on the crawled property...

DepartmentNumber

• Include in full-text index: Yes

Answer 1

Okay I found the issue.

What I needed to do was go to the managed property (in this case DeptNum). Underneath the Searchable check box, there is an Advanced option. Clicking that, allows me do touch the index settings of the managed properties. It was set to 'Default'. I switched it to People.

I ran a full crawl against the MySite source, and 10 min after that was completed everything was working.