But not every company suffers from an epidemic of employee disengagement. A handful of top companies really do get it — engaged workers aren’t just happier and more productive, but also the source of the vast majority of breakthrough ideas. (Click here to tweet this thought.) In addition to being great places to work if you happen to be looking for a job, these best-of-class companies can serve as inspiration for managers hoping to better inspire their teams.

So who exactly are these much desired organizations, and how do they attract top talent?

Every year LinkedIn aims to find out with its annual ranking of InDemand Employers, compiled by sorting through reams of data from the website. The latest edition is now out, so who made the list of America’s dream employers? Here are the top ten:

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Amazon
4. Facebook
5. salesforce.com
6. The Walt Disney Company
7. Nike
8. McKinsey & Company
9. PepsiCo

There’s no shock at the top of the list as Google and Apple retain their (unsurprising) position at the top of the heap from last year. Nor were there any huge movers, but Amazon, with its bold and much chattered-about initiatives including drone delivery and controversial hardball tactics with publishers, did climb a couple of spots from number five to number three. Walt Disney, however, was two slots less magical this year.

So what makes a company such a dream employer? LinkedIn suggests five factors that these firms emphasize when hiring that keep them so demand among talent and so deeply engaging once they hire.

Authenticity

The best companies for employee engagement, unsurprisingly, encourage team members to bring their whole selves to work. “The culture at NBCUniversal is not a faceless corporate culture, it’s a culture that allows people to have a personality. Being true to your personality while maintaining professionalism is the key to success with landing your dream job here,” says NBCUniversal (ranked #15) VP of Talent Acquisition James Ryding, for instance.

Sociability

Top employers engage deeply with candidates on social media and encourage potential hires to have deeper connections to the company than a simple scan of the webpage.

Team orientation

The firms that topped the list don’t hire many lone wolves. Adobe (ranked #24) VP of Global Talent Selection and Development Jeff Vijungco says: “We want individuals with a unique skillset that complements the team, a sense of urgency to deliver beyond what’s possible and ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ team players.”

Ambition

Top workers don’t just work — they also dream big. “When you interview, show us your passion, your innovative mind, and intrigue us with your big ideas on the impact you could have on our company, customers and our community,” says salesforce.com SVP of Global Employee Success Monika Fahlbusch.

Adaptability

If you want to hire top employees, don’t expect them to do the same thing day in and day out. One of the keys to being engaging and in demand is routinely shaking things up and encouraging employees to follow their passions. “Prospects should be open and determined about pursuing passions yet flexible enough to jump in to anything,” says VMware (ranked #19) Director of Executive Staffing Anu Datta.

Employers: How could you emphasize these five factors to bring in more top recruits?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, contributes regularly to Forbes and Women 2.0 and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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Growing our customer base is something we work at every day with our own startup, iDoneThis. We help startups and businesses manage team progress with daily status reports.  Through a lot of trial and error, we’ve grown our customer base, befriended our customers and learned one very important lesson: you never know what will work, so why not experiment?  

Here are 3 things we didn’t think would work, but did:

1. Keep it simple

Start with the simplest idea. Then simplify it.

iDoneThis began with an idea that was so simple it was stupid. Think I’m joking? On Dec. 17, 2010, Rodrigo (our CTO) sent Walter (our CEO) an email entitled “Stupid Idea.” In the email, Rodrigo described an email-based system that asked you, daily, “What did you get done today?” and then kept track of your replies. Out of this email, iDoneThis was born.

Everything built slowly from there. Friends and family were incredulous that iDoneThis could become anything serious because of how simple it was. But we talked to our users who told us that they loved the service because it was so easy to use.

Keeping it simple can be a competitive advantage for your product. Simplicity appeals to a broader base of users. Simple services have a variety of use-cases that overlap with “legitimate” businesses and have an inherent advantage over those services merely for being simple.

2. Don’t Wait for Them to Come, Go to Them

Find out where your target users hang out, what they read, who they listen to and what influences them. Then seek out the channels that influence your user base and go to them.

When iDoneThis first started, we made the mistake of believing “if we build it, they will come.” They never came. So we took matters into our own hands and started talking about ourselves to influential communities.

We posted to Hacker News. We posted on Reddit. We left comments talking about ourselves on a Lifehacker article. We tailored everything we wrote to the specific audience, making sure that the story we told about our business was relevant to them.

More importantly, we didn’t give up when one channel was closed to us. We originally tried to pitch iDoneThis to Lifehacker, but to no avail. Instead, we sent a custom-written story about our product to a smaller site, How-to-Geek. Our article on How-to-Geek drew enough attention that it was picked up by Lifehacker the next day.

Each post brought us visitors to our site, visitors who became customers and continue to be customers today. So do your research. Figure out where to tell your business’s story to influence readers to become potential customers.

Which brings me to my next point…

3. Write your own story

Writing your own story means taking control of your startup’s narrative and giving your business and your team an identity and voice through that narrative. It means tailoring the story for different audiences and controlling the distribution of your stories, so that each hits the right note with the right readers.

In the past, we offered nuggets of news about our business to journalists as exclusives and we were written about on influential tech news sites. It made sense to go to the press and blogs with our news because they (1) have distribution and (2) are expert in crafting a story.

Then one day, we wrote our own story.  e posted it to our own blog. The post we wrote was simple but very personal: we wrote about the work we did behind the scenes at our company and the efforts we made to get people talking about iDoneThis.

The result? We hit an all-time one-day high for traffic and added 1,000+ customers, more than double the customers that resulted from our press piece.

Writing your own story and being transparent about your business efforts gives you a competitive advantage. When you write your own story, you build a relationship with the readers themselves. They follow you on Twitter and “like” you on Facebook, creating subscriptions, essentially. Through these channels, you can reach them again and again.

What Does This Mean for You?

These three tactics unexpectedly and directly increased our customer base. The lesson here is to get creative when spreading the word about your startup. Try a different tactic you’re not sure will succeed. People just might surprise you and come running.

Ginni Chen is Chief Happiness Officer at iDoneThis, a startup that helps other startups and businesses manage progress through daily status reports.

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Check out the video below, in which Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow talks about how several brushes with death helped him get past fear to do some great things with his life. That includes launching Buddy Media, a social media company that sold to Salesforce.com for $689 million just hours before Lazerow told his story on YouTube.

We first learned of the video from Mashable, which wrote:

The clip is raw and emotional. However, throughout it, Lazerow doesn’t speak a single word. Instead, he tells his own remarkable story and a bit about the acquisition, via a keynote slideshow on his iPad. Lazerow, who has had a life-long heart condition is smiling during most of it, but he’s also clearly wiping away a tear or two as he reacts to some of what he’s sharing.

Here’s the four-minute video:

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I’ve had to figure out how to get those other parts handled when all I want to do is write. I’m not the only one, either; when your business is based on your own creativity, odds are pretty good that you enjoy actually designing or writing or creating something new. It can be tough to balance your creative work and actually go out there to sell. But sell we must, assuming we want to stay in business.

Here are a few tips to help you balance the two parts of a creative business:

1. Focus on making a set amount every day. I routinely tell myself that until I’ve made a certain amount in a given day, I can’t write. It can be a painful process, but because I’m thinking about the minimum I need to make every day, I can almost always make enough sales early in the day — and it’s inspired me to market as much as possible so that I wake up with the day’s quota already full.

2. Build a profile for big customers. Any time I create a new product, I build a profile of customers who could potentially put in big orders. I research that profile thoroughly and write it up, which plays to my creative strengths — depending on what your skills are, use them to make this prospective customer as real as possible. Then I invest my time in getting my products in front of those customers.

Sure, I invest time and energy in selling individual products, but going back to creating a quota, the more big customers I can land, the less selling I need to do.

3. Create visual reminders of what you’re working towards. I keep pictures and notes on my desk that help me visualize specific goals I’m working toward. This technique doesn’t work so well for big broad ambitions; rather, I’ve got a picture of how I’d like to remodel my house and the amount my business needs to earn for me to be able to afford that next step.

4. Reward yourself (and your team) for doing well. There’s a reason that the saying, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is still remembered long after others have disappeared. As entrepreneurs, it’s easy to want to work every hour of every day, often on one very specific part of our businesses. It’s common to offer rewards to your team when you meet certain goals, but it’s just as important to reward yourself — even if it’s just a nice meal if you’ve gotten all your work done.

5. Develop mental systems for selling. One of the reasons that many creatives can struggle with sales is because there’s a logic to doing creative work: if I use certain vocabulary, a written project is going to appeal to a certain audience. But when we move over to the business side of things, we’re learning entirely new systems — which may not match up with our experiences of how things are supposed to work. Getting a mental system in place that makes sales sensible is crucial.

6. Hire the right team as you grow. As an entrepreneur, you’re moving in the direction where you have to have help in order for your business to run. As you’re hiring your team, think in terms of not only who will free up the most time for your creative work but also who will help you the most in terms of sales. Entrepreneurs need to be able to sell, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t bring in team members who manage most of the process for us.

Thursday Bram is the founder of Hyper Modern Consulting, an online content creation and consultation firm.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business’s development and growth.

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