Recruit Reboot Fill your job openings the right way with these solutions.

When PopularMedia in San Francisco hit a growth spurt a couple years ago, managers were suddenly working job boards, skimming resumes and doing phone screens on top of everything else. "It's just too much to ask of people, and you're not likely to generate the volume and quality of candidates," says Jim Calhoun, 38, co-founder of the 5-year-old social media marketing firm. "We looked at it and said, 'We've got a big process problem.'"

But what to do? Entrepreneurs face a dizzying array of recruiting choices today, from traditional search firms and software to social networking sites and job boards. "It's a cacophony of sound," says Peter Crist, chairman of Crist Kolder Associates, a C-level recruiting firm.

The $100 billion U.S. recruiting industry is not only noisy, but it's also unregulated. "There's no university that offers a degree in recruiting," says John Sullivan, a management professor at San Francisco State University. "You can say you're a recruiter by just saying it." Choose the wrong recruiting method, and pay the price in time, money and wrong hires.