As a new graduate, you have strong educational qualifications but probably feel you don’t have much to offer in terms of “real-world” business experience. As a result, you might be wondering what to communicate in your resume and in interviews–what can you say and what should you share to pique the interest of potential employers?

The job market is tight, but you still have much to offer as long as you know how to stand out and emphasize your positive attributes as a new hire.

Year after year, employers are eager to hire new graduates because you bring fresh thinking and moldable skills to their businesses. They are happy to teach you what you need to know to be successful within their organization. By understanding this, you can turn your inexperience into an asset.

Any job seeker, regardless of experience, has the same fundamental resume-writing challenge: to demonstrate the skills and competencies needed to do a particular job. You may not have accomplishments, experiences, success stories, and examples from your professional career as “evidence” of your capabilities, but that’s okay; employers don’t expect it.

What they do expect, is that you’ll have a general understanding of the kinds of skills you’ll need to use on the job and that you possess some relevant examples and accomplishments to share.

Quite likely you have more to offer than you think! There is much “gold” that can be mined from your college career, part-time work experiences, co-op or internship jobs, volunteer and extracurricular activities. Think about how this experience plays into your qualifications and value as an employee and incorporate that information into your resume.

Standing out from stacks of paper resumes and countless entries in a job listing site is difficult unless you arm yourself with better tools. Before you start on your resume, VisualCV has a free guide to help you build a better resume. Pay close attention to the section dedicated to resume building for new graduates which will provide you with valuable information on how to best stand out.

Using VisualCV as a tool to create a better resume, and share it with your network, recruiters and potential employers gives you an edge over traditional paper resumes and over unformatted lists of keywords your resume is reduced to when put into a “job finding” website.

Are you looking for a job online? Do you need to know what the best job search engines are? Here are the top three job search engines and a strategy that will help you expand your online job search.

Engine #1

Monster comes in first because they are the largest and provide the best resources. You can post your resume for employers and search for jobs that are listed.

Engine #2

Careers is the second stop on your search because they are more local oriented than most of the other search engines. They offer a different site for each major city in the United States. Many employers prefer careers.com because they are so localized and provide hot leads for employers. You can post your resume and search jobs in your field at careers.com

Engine #3

Hotjobs, which is powered by Yahoo!, is your last stop on the online job search train. They provide quite a few great job listings and are very easy to use. They are not as big as Monster.com or as localized as Careers.com, but you never know where you might find that perfect job.

There is another strategy to finding a job that works very well. Use Yahoo.com’s local search and search for companies in your field. Then, visit their website and email them your resume. You could also mail it if they don’t have a website listed. This is a great way to get your resume in front of employers that have yet to place their employment ads or might be looking for someone, but don’t have an ad out there.