The pool of available, highly-skilled technical talent seems to be disappearing these days. You’ve scoured the job boards, tapped out your social network, and don’t know where to turn next.

But, with a little detective work, you can uncover tech talent.

In a Next Web Insider article, Chris Lea, a Performance Engineer at Media Temple, says that 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,” Lea says. “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”

You don’t need to be Nancy Drew to discover the right talent. Social media can be 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.”

So, assess the skill set you need, use social media to find niche groups, and infiltrate. Look for the guys and gals who are solving problems for fun in these groups – the mark of a true IT rockstar.

Download “Finding Tech and IT Talent” for more tech sleuthing techniques.

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This post originally appeared at www.atango.com.