Maybe they’re helping new startups rise to Googledom. Or maybe they’re enjoying the spoils of working for big business. Whatever the case, these guys and gals are enjoying the job flexibility that comes with being in high demand.

Great tech talent. You won’t find it by hitting the job boards.

A Techie’s Playground

The real players in technology aren’t hanging out on gloomy job boards. They’re bouncing around the web, stretching their skill set, and helping newbies along the way.

And many of these ideal candidates are gathering in one place.

These places are public forums where talent gathers to learn and advance their technical niche. Some would call them talent communities.

They have little or nothing to do with employment.

They have everything to do with innovation and passion - making talent communities fertile ground for technical candidates.

Uncovering Tech Talent Communities

So, where can one find these communities bursting with shop talk? Is there anything out there beyond Stackoverflow?

To find out, start stalking.

Social media is a fantastic tool for finding out where talent is hanging out, seeing what they’re talking about, and beginning to build candidate relationships that will pay off in the future.

"Remember that today’s popular social networks were built by IT professionals," says Dimple Kochikar, Director of Recruiting for RunE2E. "Tech pros were early adopters of social technology and can be found on - and recruited from - all of the major social media sites. Within these sites, try to identify the specialized groups where prospects may be networking with their IT peers. Use creative, non-offensive ways to integrate into these groups and to promote your job opportunities."

Wading through the Tech Talent Pool

While online talent communities are great places to initiate a conversation with talent, it can be difficult to identify the real deal - especially when you are not technically inclined yourself.

"First," says Chris Lea, a Performance Engineer at Media Temple, "you have to sit down and establish what skills you need, whether that’s JavaScript, RoR, Node, EC2, MySQL, Python or MongoDB. Every single one of these disciplines will have a social scene, an online community. You have to infiltrate those communities."

“On most of these hangouts," Lea continues, "There will be small groups of people who are the rock stars, answering everyone’s questions. Those are the guys you want to talk to.”

Mystery solved.

image from here.

This post originally appeared at www.sendouts.com.