You prepared your resume. Invested in a closet full of professional clothing. Brushed up on your interview skills.

But you still feel like one in a large crowd of other job seekers. How do you stand out from the competition and distance yourself from all of the other job seekers out there?

Check out these five ways to stand out from the job-seeking crowd:

Congratulations! You successfully applied for a job and landed an interview.

There’s only one catch — it’s a panel interview. Instead of one person conducting the interview, there will be multiple people, sometimes as many as four or five. As a job seeker, interviews are bad enough without the idea of multiple people being present.

Here’s how to survive a panel interview:

(This post was updated on 6/22/2020)

Using alumni networks is an ideal starting point for any college student’s career.

Whether you’re a professor, adviser, or career counselor, you serve as an excellent resource for your students when it comes to networking. Because of your position, you have access to a vast network of alumni who can help your current students advance their careers.

Alumni networks serve as a crucial pool of advice and career opportunities for college students. According to a 2020 Jobvite survey, 45% of job seekers found out about job openings through friends, and 31% found out through their professional networks. Networking is an excellent way for college students to break into their industries. Most college students are searching for ways to network into internships and jobs; and alumni can serve as the first stepping stone.

When helping students connect with alumni, it’s important to be strategic. Ideally, you should connect your current students with students you have a good relationship with. This way, you serve as a mutual connection between the student and alum, and you avoid putting your current student in an awkward situation. 

To help students tap into alumni networks, consider these ideas for connecting current and past students:

Thanksgiving is famous for its traditions- family, food, and of course, football. While the holiday may not seem to have much to do with job searching, in fact there are many parallels to be found between the traditional aspects of Thanksgiving and job searching.

Check out these Thanksgiving traditions job seekers can use to help with their search:

Searching for a job can be an exhausting task. Trying to prepare a resume, keep your network fresh, and stay current with your interview skills can be overwhelming. And to make matters worse, career management is about more than just finding a job; it’s about keeping track of your career as a whole and monitoring its direction and focus.

While there are a lot of things job seekers are getting right, there are certain elements of career management many job seekers overlook.

Here’s what you might be forgetting:

Many applicants, despite stellar resumes and cover letters, fail to make it past the interview stage. Often, this is due to little mistakes during the interview that leave a big impression.

Here are five things never to do during a job interview:

It’s time to find a job. You’ve dusted off your job search profile, but how is your resume?

The key to a stand-out resume is phrasing. Your experience and skills are important, but don’t just list your experiences, describe them. Use bullet points to elaborate on exactly what you did and what skills you can bring to the table.

However, instead of everyday language, use power words to take your resume to the next level and help it go from good to great, grabbing employers’ attention.

Dressing professionally can be a challenge, especially for individuals who are just starting out. (Have the clothes but need a job? Check out our job search checklist.) And with changing standards for what professional dress means, it’s becoming even more difficult to know what works and what doesn’t.

However, with these 10 staples in your closet, you can be confident your professional dress hits the mark for any occasion:

You’ve recently graduated from college. You’re ready for a change. Or maybe you’re reentering the workforce after time spent away. At any rate, it’s time to find a job. The question is, how long should you expect the process to take?

From finding the job posting itself, to scoring an interview, to getting an offer and actually getting started, knowing how much time to budget for finding a new job can be tricky. Individuals who are simply moving jobs have more flexibility with this, while recent grads with loans are in more of a hurry to get things figured out.

You’ve heard of SEO or search engine optimization — but it’s a strategy only webmasters and marketers use…right?

Actually, as a job seeker, you can take these tricks marketers use to bring their products to the top of the rankings and apply them to help market yourself as a qualified candidate.

The first step, of course, is to get a website or blog…or both! If you don’t already have one, now is the time to start. There are plenty of free, user-friendly hosts to choose from like Wix, WordPress, and more.

Even if you’re not a tech-savvy webmaster, you can still implement a few SEO tricks to boost your job search: