Join the discussion on Talent Talk Cafe two times a week on Tuesday's and Thursday's at 3pm ET / 12 pm PT!

Thanks to a lot of work by Maren we have a new Chat platform launching this week on RecruitingBlogs. You'll find the new Chat in the center of the Community page and can link to it off the main RecruitingBlogs.com page. Just look for the blue framed box and sign up!

Tuesday, April 14th
Join me for an open discussion to check out the Chat platform. Today's Chat is an open forum to discuss anything that's on your mind - social recruiting, social media, branding, recruiting technology, workforce planning, hot topics you'd like to see on upcoming Talent Talk Cafe Chats!

Plus, Maren will be joining us to give you all the scoop and inside tips on some cool features the new Chat offers. There isn't a Ning Chat alternative so you'll need to take one extra steps initially to get set up and let everyone know who you are:

> Sign-up with Chatroll so your name appears
> Add a picture so we can see your beautiful face

You can find me on TalentSynchronicity.com and of course on Twitter @TalentSynch

Maren is an increasingly wise and important voice in the recruiting space. She's a brilliant marketer and combines here a background in in this discipline with recruiting to push the boundaries and develop great solutions. Meet up with Maren on Twitter @marenhogan

Thursday, April 16th
Ben Gotkin - our newest Talent Talk Cafe host will be leading a discussion on: Job Boards in 2009 – Gold Mine, Necessary Evil or Irrelevant?

"Recruiters and Job Seekers have a love/hate relationship with Job Boards. Some recruiters don’t know better than to love them, some consider them to be a necessary evil, and some just hate altogether. Job seekers typically end up frustrated by the ‘black-hole’ dilemma inherent with applying for jobs online. Historically, there has been too much misuse and abuse of job boards by recruiters, job seekers and the job boards themselves. There are more active job seekers now than ever before, and many of them are using job boards in their job search efforts. In there current environment, good hires can be made from job boards. There has to be a better way, right?"

"The concept of a job board isn’t inherently bad, is it? An organization posts a job and a candidate applies for the job online. When job boards started to appear in the 90’s they were going to solve all of our problems, right? What went wrong?"

> What can corporate recruiters do better to optimize their utilization of job boards?
> What advice should we (and the job boards) be giving job seekers on how to most
effectively utilize job boards in their job search efforts?
> Job boards are a large cost for most corporate recruiting organizations. Do the job
board pricing models make sense any more, especially with free/low cost search
engines, job board aggregators and Craigslist gaining popularity/market share?

Ben is National Recruiting Director at McGladrey. Don't miss Ben on Twitter @lifeatmcgladrey!.