I want to find an aggressive programmer/internet research and
marketing guru. This person would develop proprietary programs,
spiders, bots, to find buyers/sellers internationally for our
business. The skill set required is as follows: Sql 7 design and
maintenance. VB, Java, and Active X programming skills. Ability to
develop spiders and bots to identify business customers globally.
Ability to conceptualize business needs and develop an automated
strategy to retrieve and utilize filtered data from the internet.
Creative marketing approach to Internet business applications.
Ecommerce/marketing development and design. Ability to verify URL's
and refine collected data. Ability to train others for maintenance.
Ability to communicate with non-technical sales team. This is a
contract position and depending on the individual it could develop
into a full time position. Where should I look for individuals that
have in-depth knowledge and experience in these areas???

Thanks,
Joel

Dear Joel1357,

Thanks for your question about locating this especially skilled
individual. I believe that you have a number of tools at your
disposal: you can try to contract someone through a recruitment agency
such as Elance (more on that shortly), if you have the time and
inclination, you can search for that person yourself.

Recruitment agencies like Elance [http://www.elance.com] or Ultimit
[http://www.ultimit.com] can be located by using a search engine and a
search string such as 'application developer recruitment' (no quotes.)
For specialized IT developers, you might additionally try the Shay
group [http://www.shaygroup.com] or the Whitney Group
[http://www.whitneygroup.com/].
All of these companies specialize (to one degree or another) in
skilled IT workers. To determine your compatibility with these
companies I would advise you to get in touch with them through their
web pages -- take a look and see which ones look the most promising.

You can also take a less orthodox route and pursue your future
employee in the venues in which he or she is likely to be. I'm
particularly referring to developers' groups, either online or
in-the-flesh. Some online include:

[http://www.d2dforums.com/]
Developer to Developer Forums
This group includes forums (fora?) dedicated to ActiveX and a number
of database types to say the least. Each different application forum
has a "work/jobs/contracts" section, so you could post your query
there.

[http://www.swynk.com/discuss_sql7/]
This group is a forum devoted to working with SQL Server 7; there is a
job base, but by reading posts you can probably get a good idea of
what different posters' strengths are. As you can imagine, one of the
benefits of this method is that you have the chance to watch
applicants interacting and get a sense of their relative strengths.

I found these forums by searching google for 'activex developer forum'
and 'sql 7 developer forum' respectively. Since your ideal candidate
has many strengths, I would recommend that you also look in virtual
basic developer groups, java groups, etc.

I hope this is helpful. If I've been unclear or you would like me to
expand my answer, please don't hesitate to let me know. I wish you the
best of luck with your candidate search!

Libronaut-ga

Joel,

It seems that you have a major need that has to be fulfilled...while
it would be great to find someone with this great set of skills you
would be better off if there were two or three people to fill this
void. From a project management perspective, one person could be
spread a little thin if facing such a large range of responsibility!

answerguru-ga

Hi Joel!

I'm really confused with your request and would be interested in how
you got the software skill set to match out the "needs" skill set.
Those two sets aren't really good together. ActiveX for instance is a
programming tool used for fancy interfaces, and VB is not really the
tool to use for searching the internet as you describe. You can do it,
but there are far better tools available, and much easier to find the
talent for them. I do this type of work and hire people to do this
type of work all the time, and I've been with you from the start on
here, so I thought I had an idea of what you needed, but this question
throws me, as its apparently thown a few other researchers.

The database is fine by the way, the SQL7. That's no worry... but the
others... Would you mine posting a reason or two for those choices?

webadept-ga