Having gone to a lot of industry events that I find on places like Meetup.com I always run into a recruiter or two who is looking to connect with candidates, especially of the tech kind. I've seen some blog posts on the subject, notably stuff like this;

http://www.sourcecon.com/news/tag/sourcing-from-meetup/

http://www.sourcinghacks.com/how-to-identify-passive-candidates-on-...

But I wonder how many of you go to actual events to connect with talent in person? Do you make a habit to do it consistently?

As an avid networker myself I realize the that meetup offers a ton of ways to build ones own network.But a growing number of other sites do to. How you ever hear of Eventbrite, Lanyard or Eventful?

In early December I hired a freelance web guy to build a simple tool to find more of these events easily. The result is called 99events.com. It searches 4 sites at once...meetup/eventbrite/eventful/ and facebook events (what little there is of them). 

Anyway its a free tool but here are some of the searches you can do. I think those of you who network old school will like it.

• Lets say you wanted to network in the NYC startup scene. Just type in a keyword 'startup' and 'New York, New York' to get these results.
• Or perhaps you need to recruit marketing talent in Boston. Just type in 'marketing' and get these events.

I think you get the idea. Happy new year and happy networking!