By T.J. Ripley
To find candidates on the Web, you've got to visit the sites that they do.
By walking a mile in their shoes (or surfing the Web on their board), you
can get a better idea of how they view the world. Doing so can help you
keep up-to-date on the latest trends and buzzwords in their industries and
give you a sense of what attracts their eyes. You can then use that
experience and the information you gather to construct better search
strings, create job reqs or decide where to place job postings.
When looking for software developers, one popular spot to visit is The
Development Exchange at
http://www.devx.com. This site provides online
technical information for developers of corporate business applications,
Web sites and e-commerce solutions. In December, the site had 1.5 million
unique visits from IT development professionals.
Typical of a professional portal, The Development Exchange (DevX) provides
news, tips, downloads and links to industry resources. But the site offers
lots more. It is organized into 12 different zones that correspond to
developer's specialties (such as ASP, C++, JavaBeans and Visual Basic).
Within each zone are links to articles, newsgroups and the top sites
within each specialty, all targeted toward developers. There is a wealth
of information here and plenty of resources to draw from. Whatever kind of
corporate software developer you are seeking, you'll most likely find
something new and useful you can use here.
The site maintains links to a variety of magazines geared toward
programming professionals, such as Enterprise Development, Web Builder and
XML Magazine. In addition, there are links to upcoming conferences,
reference materials and online question and answer centers that focus on
software development issues.
Within its Community section, DevX provides a means to search for user
groups in your area. This section is also the home for a series of
discussion groups (online forums) that give you a sense of what sorts of
issues and challenges developers face.
The site also employs a powerful search tool for finding material relevant
to software developers. If you've got a particular application,
programming language or specialty you're interested in, you can enter the
term on the search page and look through the DevX site or through all the
development sites that DevX is linked to. It's a handy way to look for
good technical resources related to specialized terminology.
Take a look at what's here, it might give you a new perspective on your
candidate searches.
-- T.J. Ripley is a journalist and Web explorer who contributes to AIRS
research and writing.
About AIRS
AIRS teaches recruiters and high-growth companies to find passive candidates
hidden inside directories, databases, archives and the public Web servers of
over 400,000 companies and organizations on the Net. For more information
about our cutting edge training seminars, publications, or web applications
please call 1-800-466-4010 or check out our web site at
http://www.airsdirectory.com.
