Anyone who has attended or read about the Social Recruiting Summit held at Mountain View, Google’s HQ, would have been amazed at the sheer number of major employers who took the time to talk about their social recruiting methodologies and strategies at the event. It makes one wonder why there was no similar event for Facebook or LinkedIn.

The clear yet unspoken theme and message of the summit was that the social platforms would serve as the next frontier, and the future of recruiting to solve all recruiting problems faced by employers today. Some employers even got as far as suggesting they will discontinue their career site and instead just build out one on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

While social technology plays a huge role in an employer’s strategy to become appealing and establish relationships with top talents and crucial candidate segments, it is but a portion from a multi-channel concept that has to be created. For companies to truly bring online a strategy that will eliminate fascination with job boards as the only source of talent, a multi-channel technique has to be utilized and employed to address this and consequently achieve the results desired.

Key elements must include SEO and marketing, employee referral marketing, classifieds sponsorships, talent community development, together with other factors that can help with recruiter optimization.

The hype with social media is reasonable if not justified, as it is the next frontier and it is a very useful tool and accomplice for recruiters everywhere, but it is also complicated and this makes it a mystery even for the most cunning consumer marketing minds. Social media is a process that takes time, so it is only right to carefully examine and design an approach that is multi-faceted before actually employing it, as this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg of a new world for recruiting.