Perhaps youve discovered that your career has stalled. While it is true that you are gainfully employed, you just dont seem to be progressing down your career path as fast as youd like. Youve determined that the roadblock in your career is not the result of your lack of experience, your lack of education, or your lack of interpersonal skills. Youve come to the conclusion that your failure to hit a career high is due to the fact that you simply dont know how to market yourself well.

You realize that you cannot take out a billboard advertising your credentials. And, while you can certainly work on polishing your networking skills, a lack of contacts doesnt seem to be the problem. Youve been diligently sending your resume to numerous employers, but no one seems to be bitingyou havent secured a single job interview for quite some time. Youre stuck in a career rutand the only way out is to make your resume more professional and more attractive to a potential employer. But how do you go about accomplishing that goal?

Realize the Importance of Your Resume

Up to this point, you might have been throwing together your resumes at the last minute, thinking that you could compensate for any problems with your resume in your subsequent job interview. However, you must realize that your resume is, in fact, your most effective career marketing tool. If worded properly, it can open doors for you, offering you opportunities that you wouldnt have had otherwise.

A resume represents your initial introduction to a hiring manager. It should demonstrate how your work history, career accomplishments, job skills, and personality traits are ideally suited for the job thats been advertised. In fact, you can think of a resume as being like a corporate website, introducing anyone who reads it to who you are, what youve done, and what you could potentially do for a clienti.e., an employer. The resume needs to be inviting to read and reflect uponbut, like a website, it should provide snippets of information in an easily digestible format.

Demonstrating Your Marketing Savvy

Once you realize the crucial function of your resume in terms of marketing yourself, your next step is to find ways to show off your marketing savvy. In order to do this, you should draw up a list of your chief skills and professional attributes. Then, come up with a list of career milestones that provide further evidence of your abilities. Do not limit yourself to paid work experiences. Also include your significant volunteer activities, educational experiences, and the like. Some of the skills you might want to highlight would include your managerial ability, your leadership capability, your communication ability, and your decision-making capability. These are the types of skills a prospective employer is likely to be looking for in a job applicant.

Next, you need to give serious consideration to your audiencethe prospective employer. You should try to determine the employers chief challenges, based on the nature of the industry, the competitors the company faces, and similar considerations. With this information, you should have a greater understanding of the employers wants.

Connect the Dots

Once youve identified your strengths and an employers needs, you need to connect the dots, showing how you can fulfill the requirements sought by the employer. This can be accomplished by carefully crafting your objective so that it will capture the eye of the hiring manager, making him or her think that you are the perfect candidate for the position.

Drawing the right connections may, in fact, be the most critical part of the resume-building process. Unless you can convince an employer that he or she would be better off hiring you, you are unlikely to make the final cut. At times, you may need to demonstrate a fair amount of creativity in order to show the connectionbut it is well worth the effort, particularly if it enables you to attain the job.

Polishing the Product

Any sharp marketer knows that you have to hone your advertising copy in order to ensure that it captures the interest of the consumer. The same is certainly true for a resume. Once you have the basic format in place, dress it up by placing the most important points near the topwhittling away extra verbiage so that the document is not overly wordyand deleting any non-essential information such as social security number, birth date, and marital status. While it is a wise idea to incorporate certain stylistic techniques such as italicization, bold-face, and elegant fonts, resist the urge to overdue it. Otherwise, your resume could end up being quite difficult to read.

Be Sure to Use Marketing Phrases

Given the fact that you are attempting to market your career, its advisable for you to use some key marketing phrases throughout your resume. These would include words such as top-earner, high-performance, number-one seller, etc. Granted, you dont want your resume to sound like a commercial, but you do want to get a strong message across. After all, the employer is in a buying moodhe or she wants to hire someone to fill a vacant position. Therefore, you should take advantage of the opportunity to highlight your qualifications in the most effective way possible.

RememberOne Job Leads to Another

It is important to keep in mind that the position youre now applying for may not be the last job you ever have. Chances are it will lead to additional jobsjobs that offer even greater opportunities for professional advancement, networking, and significant responsibility.

Consequently, in addition to marketing yourself in the here and now, you are marketing yourself for the future. This is particularly important if you are applying to a company that has a history of promoting from within. You want to show the employer that you have the capability of growing with the company, contributing significantly to the corporation over the long-term. In other words, your resume could lead you to the job which could provide the stepping stone to even more rewarding positions in the years ahead.