It seems there have been a lot of posts recently about the difficulty of finding the right person for software development jobs. Or maybe I’m just tuned in to those posts because there are some openings on my team right now (here is a job listing for one of them) and we’re having difficulty with exactly that problem.

That’s one reason why I’m excited to see the start of a few “discriminating” (in the type and quality of jobs they post), targeted job boards. Stuff like jobs.joelonsoftware.com, 37signals Job Board, CodeBetter.com, and most recently Hidden Network. I don’t know what I think yet about how long these sites can continue to attract job posts from top employers, but as long as they are, I’m all for it. I think the thing I like best about the blog-displayed job ads is that they will be presented to the people who are passionate about their field, and probably wouldn’t post their resume on Monster. Those are the people I want to hire for my team (just like everybody else) and are the people hardest to get a job opportunity in front of without knowing them personally.

The downside, though, is that many of these job ads won’t be distributed inside a blog’s RSS feed, which means many people will never see them unless they visit the actual site—something usually only done by people searching the web for an answer to their problem, not regular readers.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’ve signed up with Hidden Network because I understand the frustration that comes from not finding the right candidate for the job, and I want to help “spread the word” as much as possible, with the hopes that someone else will be doing the same, and eventually we’ll all get the people we want to hire—with world peace thrown in.

So be sure to check out the job ads on my site… somewhere a little child is depending on you!