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.

Who better to ask about recruiting brand than the man who prides himself on being everywhere in the world that Talent Acquisition gathers? (Note: four conferences in the last month alone.)

If you’re a recruiter and you hear Big Pimpin’ come on the radio, you may think of Matt Charney. Not for any illicit activity or “spendin’ cheese”, but for his particular penchant for Jay-Z themed powerpoints that accompany most his conference presentations and his undisputed honorific of “recruiting influencer”. Which is, indeed, both big and pimpin’.

See Matt Charney in Person at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco.

We know Charney as the Chief Content Officer at Allegis Global Solutions, as well as Executive Editor at Recruiting Daily, but most of all, in an industry not always associated with saleable personality, he’s a proper brand – thousands of people in the HR space look to Charney for competent – at times, satirical – analysis of all things TA.

The influencer status isn’t just about his 24K+ Twitter followers. Twitter followers can be bought. His rep is thanks to years of experience building a tangible knowledge base, a real network, with real people, who trust you. Whether working for Disney, Warner Bros or Cornerstone, he built his brand on the simple but effective tool of “not being a dick”. No number of Tweet-Ks will get you that.

And today, he’s here to talk to us about how you can create your own great recruiter brand. But be warned, there are no shortcuts, no pay-offs, and there definitely ain’t no frontin’.

Tell us what ‘employer brand’ is.

An employer brand is set to create a highly polished image. There may be some tactical transparency, but very little. I think that what a good recruiter does, is take that image, and balance it out with some of the less filtered, honest, truth. The more you can tactfully walk back your employer brand to candidates, the more you are building a reputation of credibility.

Building ‘recruiter brand’ – is it that hard?

So here’s what I think it is: it’s simply being better than the people that are lazy.

Recruiters are extremely lazy, they try to automate everything and then even when everything’s automated then they spend a lot of time arguing the pedantics. Differentiate yourself by actually picking up the phone, being honest’ and knowing your industry.

That’s how you build a recruiter brand – by not being the guy who’s sending out emails all day.

How do you keep the two separate?

Don’t put too much emphasis on employer brand!

I worked for one little business called the Walt Disney Company, and everyone was like ‘oh my god, it must be so great to work at Disney.’ I had to recruit people for the office of the CFO, so we’re talking controllers, finance people, corporate strategists. And everyone in ‘the industry’ knew that Disney was not a great place to work, for money or for work-life balance… We paid 50 percent under market.

I would tell candidates, ‘If you want to discuss opportunities, then I’m the person who will call you back, I’m the person who will be there, and I’m the person who will be honest with you,’ and that was the game-changer, more so than any budget or campaign to build employer brand.

What then was the biggest mistake you made in building your recruiter brand?

Don’t think in terms of ‘how do I get Twitter followers?’ – these things don’t really have an impact.

For all these stupid influencer lists I make it onto, I think a free Mcdonalds hamburger via Clout might have been the best reward I’ve ever gotten. Focus on the relationships that matter, which are the people in your company.

How do you build/maintain a recruiter brand at a company that doesn’t care about hiring?

Almost every CEO says that one of their strategic imperatives is hiring, but they probably care more about shareholder value, and, if they’re a publicly traded company, that’s the way it should be.  

If you work with a CEO who doesn’t care about hiring, then you need to make it clear that the organization cares about the people. Because if the C-suite doesn’t look at human capital as a success metric, then you’ll never be able to change that.

When I worked at a company where the CEO didn’t particularly care about hiring, I could have gotten him on video to tell me how great the careers there were and how much he appreciates employees, but frankly, that was a lie, and frankly, he’s terrible on camera.

So instead I sought out other people with high hiring volume and really built relationships with them which in any organization takes some time – especially now that people don’t smoke. That’s where the real information flow happened.

Much has been said (and to my chagrin), about recruiters who are money hungry, blood sucking, pieces of …well you get the point. I would like to believe that recruiters love what they do and genuinely look out for the best interest of their candidates. After all, we’re all in this business to better the careers and quality of lives of people, right? A little money earned by recruiters doesn’t hurt either….but…wait for it…wait for it…It’s not the end all be all for some of us. We as recruiters are looked at to advise, inform, coach, network and sometimes lend a sympathetic ear to candidates. This, my friends, is absolutely, without question why YOUR RECRUITER BRANDING MATTERS!

So what’s the big deal?! Why does our recruiter branding matter? Well for one, IT MATTERS because it’s not just a reflection of yourself, but a reflection of the company you’re working for! IT MATTERS because YOU are the extension of the employer brand of your organization.  IT MATTERS because it will help you build stronger professional relationships. IT MATTERS because it builds your credibility. IT MATTERS because you want jobseekers to want to work with you.

People will know if you truly love and have a passion for what you’re doing. This is the foundation of your brand.  Once you have mastered recruiting and have the love and passion for it, then DO YOU! Let your personality shine! Being an introvert in this business will NOT work.

After a candidate phone call or email, when they inevitably check you out online, you want them to see:

Here are 10 Tips to Build Your Recruiter Branding…

1. Don’t be afraid to let people know how passionate you are and how much you love what you do!

2. Be a Rock Star at what you do!  Nothing’s worse than a good BS’er who can’t deliver the goods.

3. Be transparent to the point where they know enough to be intrigued by you. Let your personality be known.

4. Don’t be afraid to share with people what you love and have a passion outside of your profession. I like to call this a “Fun Factor.” EVERYONE NEEDS THIS!

5. Be hungry for information and learn from others on an everyday basis.  Read, read, read…stay relevant and up to date in your industry.

6. Don’t be afraid to ask others, especially leaders, experts and influencers in your industry for help. Collaborate with other departments.

7. Take what you’ve learned from others and form your own style. This is what sets you apart from other recruiters.

8. ALWAYS be willing to help candidates and fellow recruiters out if they come to you for advice or help. This is part of how you build your credibility.

9. DO USE SOCIAL MEDIA to leverage all of the above. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Blogs, etc.  I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but the #1 rule of Social Media is NOT gawking at or….ahem, stalking others profiles. It’s about ENGAGING others.  If you don’t do this, YOU HAVE FAILED. Twitter is a great way to build credibility in the chats that are conducted such as #JobHuntChat J (Shameless plug).

10. Last but not least, stay humble and BE RAD!!

Your recruiter branding nowadays is vital to your career and very important when it comes to employer branding. You’re the front lines of your company and having an awesome recruiter branding just makes for good, smart business. If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and step your recruiter brand game up!  IT MATTERS!!! It really does! The Rad Recruiter…..OUT!

Mike Chuidian ( i.e. The Rad Recruiter) is a self proclaimed Social Media junkie, sneaker addict and a Hip Hop DJ with an infinite love for recruiting. Hailing from Orange County, he is Chief Culture Officer / Sr. Technical Recruiter for Systems Alliance Inc in Baltimore, MD, and an avid surf nut.