Here’s the ugly truth: even if your resume is perfection, you STILL may not get the job…or even a phone call.

I don’t say this to be discouraging…I say it so that you realize something that took me about four months to figure out.

When I first got to this city, I thought my resume was my most powerful tool. If I had a perfectly clean, well-designed, content-filled, beautifully crafted piece of paper that expressed my most proud professional accomplishments, any company would be a fool not to swoop me up right away, right? Maybe. But that’s not what happened.

My resume had been filtered through my college professors, my parents, my past internship managers, the career center at my university and several of my peers. I don’t think I could have possibly tweaked it anymore than it had already been tweaked by the time I arrived on the D.C. scene. I thought it was golden! And actually, now that I think about it, it was! It was a damn good resume. But what I learned was that my perfect resume is just a needle in a haystack. It was a wake up call when I realized that I am not the only one who put their resume through 800 levels of editing and reshaping…there are, in fact, other ambitious people looking for work.

So, how did I fix it?

I didn’t. When I say my resume was great, I mean it. It was great. I didn’t end up getting attention from employers until I began attending more networking events in the area and handing out my job title-less business card.  I began volunteering on committees in hopes of crossing paths with that certain hiring manager who would see the potential I knew I had. And sure enough, at my very first volunteer event, I met the right person and landed a temporary position at a public affairs firm (and by temporary position, I mean paid internship).

The moral of the story is that you can’t rely solely on your resume to take you to a great job. It’s a combination of putting yourself out there to meet the right people, continuously working on your skills (even if no one is currently paying you to utilize them), and yes, having a well-crafted resume and business card on the ready.