Though companies have been slashing their budget, many are still hiring. A recent survey by Jobvite reveals that 72% of human resource professionals plan to invest more time in recruiting candidates from social network sites this year rather than from job boards. At the time of writing, the most popular networking sites for HRs are LinkedIn, followed by Twitter, then Facebook, the "Big Three" in social networking.

But low-cost traditional methods are being used as well. Sixty-eight percent of companies plan to use employee referrals to get leads. Why? The truth is that though many recruiters use job boards, they experience a level of disappointment from them, saying that the "pay to post" model (paying to post on the site) is not very valuable. One way to work around that is to use qualifying questions to help bring out the right candidates.

Other low-cost tools exist for both job seeker and recruiter, however. One such is RealMatch.com, which lets job hunters and recruiters post for free, but charges recruiters if they find a candidate they want to contact. Job hunters can build a profile and choose job titles and skills from a list created by RealMatch and matches that with job postings written by recruiters. This site is cost effective at $195 for 30 days, compared with $395 for CareerBuilder.

There's also a way to screen candidates to avoid unnecessary meetings. VoiceScreener.com lets employers record interview questions over the phone and invite applicants for an interview via email.The candidate will type in her phone number, VoiceScreener calls the number and plays the employer's questions and records the applicant's answers. Recruiters can then review these answers. This site greatly reduces the time it would normally take to screen a candidate.