By T.J. Ripley

Finding people on the Internet involves more than just finding their resumes. Lots of great candidates don’t post resumes on job boards or even create personal homepages. But they do use the Internet to communicate with their peers -- offering advice on tackling thorny issues, describing business strategies and sharing their experiences with others. And one way they do that is through discussion lists.

Discussion lists allow people who share an interest in a particular subject to talk about that subject through email. One participant asks a question or makes a comment and others respond with answers or advice. For professionals in a variety of fields and industries, such discussions make them feel more connected to their peers and help them gain valuable insight into the problems that they face at work.

Because the communication goes on through email, the participants include their addresses in their comments, as well as their names, titles, and employers. That helps them establish their identities and provides a way for others to communicate with them privately.

It’s easy to see how tapping into such discussion lists could prove useful in recruitment. Finding a discussion list full of people who talk about the issues, skills and problems that your candidate needs to know about, means finding potential recruits. And finding someone who addresses the specific problems that you are trying to solve can mean hitting paydirt.

There are thousands of discussion lists on the Internet and many Web tools can help you locate them, such as Liszt (http://www.liszt.com) and Tile.Net (http://www.tile.net/). Though the idea of discussion lists is simple enough, some can be a bit tricky to join and peruse.

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use discussion list devoted to Internet professionals, you will definitely want to check out Adventive (http://www.adventive.com). It’s actually a series of communities covering a range of businesses. The communities currently under the Adventive umbrella include I-Sales for building e-commerce knowledge and skills, I-Search for understanding search engine technology, I-PR for PR professionals, I-Design for optimizing Web site design, I-Wireless for using wireless technology effectively, I-HelpDesk for Internet business questions, I-WinSoft for understanding Windows software and I-HR for improving HR management.

It’s free to subscribe to any of the groups. The I-Sales and I-Help Desk discussion lists are distributed every business day and the others are sent out twice a week. Some of the groups are just starting out, but several are well-established and well-respected discussion lists that have attracted several thousand subscribers.

Each discussion list is moderated by an industry professional who ultimately decides which posts are sent out. The moderator may occasionally comment on items as well, providing background information and helpful advice.

If you want to see what subscribers talk about in each discussion group, you can choose to browse through the past postings at a community or you can search for specific keywords in the archives. In this way you can quickly target people with the specialized skills you seek.

The groups are for discussion purposes only; you can’t submit job postings to them. Instead you might consider advertising in a group that targets the people you want to reach. Each community maintains a page detailing the list ’s demographics (number of current subscribers, the growth rate of the list, a typical subscriber profile) and ad rates. Naturally, the rates are higher at the more popular lists.

So the next time you’re looking for a search engine optimization specialist, an e-commerce guru or a PR professional, turn to Adventive and listen in as the experts talk.

-- T.J. Ripley is a journalist and Web explorer who contributes to AIRS research and writing.