How to make your work stand out in a crowd of boring resumes!

Let's make a bet. A safe one. I'm sure there's more than a few of you out there that have spent hours, even days crafting the perfect cover letter and polishing your resume for a group of prospective employers, only to never hear back from any of them.  You swear you knocked it out of the park, but you just didn't get the response you were hoping for. The reality is that there were at least a dozen other people that did the same thing and thought they knocked their resume and cover letter out of the park too.

Whether times are good or bad, getting that extra edge has always been important. You may have the right experience, degrees and attributes, but when employers have stacks and stacks of resumes sitting on their desk, you need something that's going to make you stand out, especially these days. Writing great cover letters and resumes are a good start - an essential one, at that. But how can you go beyond that?

Showcase your work with Box.net and LinkedIn

One of the great things about LinkedIn is that you can show and tell so much more about yourself. Potential employers and connections can read recommendations about you, what your interests are and other details that are tough to fit into a standard cover letter and resume. Using Box.net's Files app for LinkedIn, you can showcase what makes you and your experience unique - you can showcase your work.

In case you're not familiar with Box, it's a service that lets individuals and businesses store and share all kinds of content online. Besides standard files like Word documents, Excel sheets and PowerPoint presentations, you can store creative files, digital photos, videos, audio files...anything you want. This is where you should take a moment to let your imagination and creativity run wild. No matter what field you're in, you can upload it to Box and share it right on your LinkedIn profile for the whole world to see. Share things like:

•    Illustrator and Photoshop files to display a creative portfolio
•    Writing samples of white papers, product brochures or press releases you've authored
•    A comprehensive archive of professional photography you've put together
•    Audio files of commercial jingles or voiceover projects
•    Digital movies you've created or video testimonials from your best references
•    Coding samples to show off your awesome programming skills

That just scratches the surface. If you think about all the work you've done, chances are you can share so much more of it than you thought. And you can do this easily just by uploading content to Box, putting it in a designated folder and sharing that folder on your LinkedIn profile. Get the Box.net Files app here.

As the Community Manager for Box.net, I use the Files app to showcase some of my work at Box - podcasts I did when we launched our iPhone app and links to interviews and articles I've been a part of for various Box launches. It's the kind of thing I could never do on a resume and cover letter.

This goes the other way too. When I was interviewing candidates for a marketing opening at Box, a few candidates mentioned pieces of information they learned from my profile and referenced some of the files I posted in my own Box portfolio. It impressed me how much research they did ahead of the interview and how detail-oriented they were. Those points were not lost in our internal candidate discussions.

Again, it all comes back to what makes you stand out. You might have the same degrees, professional background and skill set as the competition. But no one has this - your body of work. Showcase it proudly.