Four-time world record holder, and first to cross Antarctica solo, joins SmartRecruiters at Hiring Success 19 – Americas. This is his story.

We are excited to welcome Colin O’Brady to Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco (register now to hear Colin live), where he will share the details of his record-breaking trip across the 932-mile continent in just 54 days – solo and unaided.

Even more humbling than this amazing feat of endurance is how this explorer encourages all of us to erase the line in our minds between the few who can achieve and the many who cannot. Rather, he hopes his journey demonstrates that we can all draw on our “inner reservoir of strength” to summit the peaks of our own ambitions.

“I don’t think everyone wants to go walk across Antarctica, but I know that people certainly have challenges in their life,” O’Brady told Business Insider. “Everyone has reservoirs of untapped potential inside of themselves and can achieve really incredible things.”

But how to start? For Colin, it started in a small hospital in Thailand. He lay heavely bandaged from head to toe. Twenty-five percent of his body covered in severe burns.  Alone and fearful, he pondered the news his doctors had given him: he may never again walk normally.

Just a few months prior, Colin was a recent Yale grad with his whole life ahead of him. The 22-year-old felt invincible, and—after withdrawing his savings—set out to find adventure with nothing more than a backpack and a surfboard. He found himself on a remote Thai beach one night, watching fire dancers jump with flaming ropes, he decided to join in.

A moment later his leg caught in the flaming cord and ignited his whole body. Colin’s instincts kicked in long enough for him to dive into the nearby ocean… then darkness, then silence.

Colin awoke in a rural hospital, alone save for a cat who would run through the clinic and jump on his bed. He realized the situation was dire. Recovery would be a miracle in the best case scenario but, in these unsanitary conditions, it seemed impossible.

“The searing pain was unimaginable, and the morphine made it feel like there were insects crawling all over my skin, I don’t know which was worse. I was downward spiraling, ready to give up.”

Colin’s mother arrived 5 days later and began encouraging him to make goals. “Ok Colin, what do you want to do after this?” she would ask. At first, Colin couldn’t give an answer, he was too depressed to consider a future. But his mother’s relentless positivity inspired him, and a dream took shape. “Mom, I’m going to compete in a triathlon.”

Colin’s mother didn’t let him forget those words. The first day home, she put a chair infront of him saying, “Today you have to figure out how you are going to get out of your wheelchair and into this chair.” It took three hours, but he finally did it. The next day, the chair was five steps away; the day after that 10.

Eighteen months later, Colin was at the starting line of the Chicago Triathlon, where he swam, biked, and ran a combined 31.93 miles, beating out 4,000 contestants to take first place.

Colin set more goals for himself in a steady progression until he found himself tackling one of the most brutal ventures of strength and endurance, summiting the highest peak in the world: Mt Everest.

Under normal circumstances, this feat would be hard enough, but Colin planned to climb this daunting peak as part of the Explorers Grand Slam, where adventurers summit the highest peak of all seven continents and travel to the North and South poles. Colin had already climbed five of those peaks and reached both poles in the last 100 days. Now, only Mt. Everest and Mt. Denali lay before him.

His eyes bulged, his face was swollen – Colin had reached what is known as the ‘death zone’, 26,000 feet above sea level – the same altitude that a commercial airline flies. At this altitude, the human body begins dying—every breath is a struggle and every step feels like a mile.

The trek was hard. He left his tent at midnight with encouraging words from his wife (and expedition coordinator) via satellite phone. The rising sun illuminated the two-mile drop on either side of his path. Colin began to question whether or not he would reach the summit—that’s when he saw the chair.

He knew if he could take those first steps after his accident, he could finish now.

Exhausted after reaching the top of the world Colin dropped into his tent and phoned his wife to let her know he made it.

“Honey, put on your boots,” she said.

“What!?” he asked, assuming she was joking.

“If you climb Denali within the next week you will set two world records. We have a chopper waiting for you at base camp.”

So, he laced up his boots and set out for the next challenge, taking with him a rock from Everest to remind him even this mighty mountain can be broken down to its smallest part, and any journey is possible one step at a time.

Colin went on to summit Denali that same week. Completing the Explorer’s Grand Slam in 139 days. The previous record was 192 days. Now speaking about his accomplishments, Colin travels around the country to inspire athletes, students, and businesses to achieve their goals, both big and small.

SmartRecruiters is now excited to welcome Colin to our fourth annual Hiring Success Conference where he will ask recruiters and TA leaders his biggest question: “What’s your Everest?”

From employee highlights to engaging content, your LinkedIn page should be working overtime to attract the best employees.

While most businesses understand the power of social media from a branding and marketing perspective, many of their LinkedIn pages end up as little more than a glorified “About Us.”

LinkedIn may not be as colorful as Instagram, or as ubiquitous as Facebook, but it is a dynamic platform with plenty of options for building media-rich and informative pages that make an impact on visitors’ views of your company.

If your goal is to attract top-level talent, impress potential customers, and drive conversations important to your business—a compelling LinkedIn company page is a must-have. The question is, how do businesses create better LinkedIn pages?

Here are seven ways to improve your company’s Linkedin presence:

1. Cover the page basics

Before you go too far, make sure your page has all the basic information in place to make it a valuable marketing channel for your company. That means including the:

• Company name and URL
• External website link
• Company details including industry, company size, company type
• Logo (300×300 pixels is recommended) and tagline
• Company description (250-2,000 characters), utilizing industry keywords.

A LinkedIn page without this information will feel incomplete—and according to HootSuite, completed Company Pages receive twice the number of visitors of those with incomplete pages. These pages are better optimized for search as well.

2. Populate your updates with branded imagery

You’ve spent time and money creating a visual brand for your business—show it off. Consistent use of your logo and colors within your updates gives your page a professional look and helps you stand out among the 30 million other pages on LinkedIn.

3. Use Showcase pages to highlight recent work

Whatever new projects, products, or campaigns your business is working on, use Showcase Pages to provide them their own voice. This not only gives your LinkedIn a larger digital footprint, but it ensures that each initiative has a dedicated page that you can use to target specific audiences—particularly helpful when recruiting talent for a particular role or team.

You can promote and optimize these pages with keywords, just as you do with your main page.

4. Use Career pages to appeal to great talent

LinkedIn as a whole can be used for a number of purposes—but Career Pages are now specifically where businesses can promote their company culture and newly opened roles. Use Career Pages to share the story of your company through videos, photos, and employee-created content. Pages like these will help potential hires understand who your business has already hired, and why.

5. Decide on a branding strategy for your page

If the content for your LinkedIn is all over the place and you can’t seem to get consistent engagement, first settle on a branding strategy. The strategy for establishing thought leadership—sharing perspectives on industry news and trends, product how-to’s, articles that reflect your mission—is different than the strategy for lead generation—sharing upper funnel and lower funnel content like tip sheets and case studies.

You can always change your strategy over time as your objectives shift, but don’t try to do everything at once.  

6. Write short and “spicy” updates

LinkedIn recommends you keep your updates “short, sweet, and spicy.” That means text that is 150 characters or less, with an eye-catching point of view or statistic, with relevant hashtags.

Other aspects of a quality update include: using a call-to-action, adding a quality image (in the range of 1200×627 pixels) that is branded and matches the messaging, with a vanity URL that you can use to track traffic.

Speaking of URLs: Links are important, and posts with links get 45% higher engagement than those without. That said, the occasional post without a link—meant to simply pass along a message, not send readers to your website or other landing page—can also have a big impact.   

7. Follow best practices for content engagement

It can be difficult to garner engagement for your posts—and engagement is how to expand your network to reach influencers, thought leaders, and talent. Best practices for increasing engagement on LinkedIn include:

• Share effective, oft-shared content such as eBooks, SlideShares, infographics, case studies, how-to content, vivid visuals, and themed posts.
• Create targeted updates. You can alter your target audience by variables like geography, job function, seniority level, and more—and then post content that appeals to this narrower scope.
• Create your own, non-stock images, with stats and text embedded directly in them.
• Use free visual tools like Haiku Deck (creates excellent presentations for web sharing) and Piktochart (builds beautiful charts, graphs, banners, and other visual content).

An enticing LinkedIn page will make tapping into other people’s networks and finding great talent easy. Start thinking of your LinkedIn as an extension of your company brand, and you’ll no doubt find other ways to impress your peers, competitors, and future employees.