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 (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. This article is reprinted by permission from AIRS, a global leader in Internet recruitment, tools, news and information. For more information on AIRS, please go to: http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com/pages/airs.php Copyright © Hanover Capital Management Corporation 1997-2001. All Rights Reserved