Congratulations, you've graduated! Now what?

This summer, 1.4 million students will graduate from college. After tossing their caps in the air, they will begin the traumatic process of going out into the real world to find a job.

With no roadmaps, no clearly delineated instructions, no college counselors to guide them through the many pitfalls of a first-time job search, for many graduates, getting out of college is far more stressful than getting in. Graduates are largely on their own, left to figure out for themselves how best to enter a world about which they know relatively little.

While there is no step-by-step manual to guide graduating students through the complexities of a first-time job search, there are three tried and true essential characteristics of every well-orchestrated employment strategy.

Create a resume that tells a story

An effective resume should do three things:

• Let the interviewer know what kind of employment is being sought
• Highlight the qualities that demonstrate the candidate's ability to do that job; and
• Outline past work experiences and education.

Unfortunately, most resumes, even those prepared by college career services departments, are simply chronologies of work experience. The interviewer or hiring manager is left to glean what value this experience contains. Trust that most interviewers will not work very hard to find valuable nuggets buried somewhere within a simple list of jobs.

A well-prepared resume is not about what the new graduate has done, it's a promise of what he or she can do. Is it more important for an interviewer to know that a candidate managed the daily receipts at the accounting department of a major retailer, or that he or she caught accounting errors that saved the company thousands of dollars? Is it better to have played lacrosse in college, or to have led the lacrosse team to a winning season?

Hiring managers are looking for more than experience in a resume. They're looking for personal traits - persistence, ability to work under pressure, creativity, and independence - that ensure the candidate's value as a future employee. A resume is not about what has been done in the past. It's about what can be done in the future.

Avoid the online job bank trap

Often the first thing a graduating student does is post a resume on as many Internet job sites as possible. Then they sit and wait for their e-mail in-boxes to be jammed with responses from interested companies dying to line them up for interviews. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case.

Very few career-worthy jobs have been filled using job banks exclusively. Why? The answer lies in the numbers. A company posting a job is likely to receive hundreds if not thousands of resumes. Many of the applicants have qualifications and experience totally unrelated to the job description but use "keywords" to ensure their inclusion. The remainder, all identically formatted by the job database, must be laboriously sorted through to arrive at - if the employer is lucky - a handful of suitable candidates. Having gone through this sorting process ourselves, we know for a fact that most resumes are never even seen.

Online job data banks do have their advantages. They are a great source of information, for instance, about who's hiring. A company that has multiple job openings is a company that's growing. Networking can get a resume in front of the right people within that organization. In addition, there's no harm in submitting a resume to a number of the better job sites. A lucky candidate could stumble across the perfect job. Heck, someone wins the lottery every day. Just don't bet the ranch on it or wait for the winning e-mail to arrive. The numbers are against you.

Network, network, network

Think about it. Which cover letter and resume is likely to receive the most attention: the one addressed to "To Whom It May Concern," or the one written at the advice and recommendation of a person known to the interviewer? The latter, of course. Hiring managers greet unsolicited resumes with the same enthusiasm as calls from credit card companies at dinnertime. So how to go about finding these referrals?

More often than not, it's through successful networking. The truth is, networking is the most effective tool for obtaining personalized and preferential access to hiring companies.

There is nothing recent graduates find more intimidating and uncomfortable than building and using their own network. To many grads, asking friends and associates for help finding a job is one cut above begging - at best embarrassing, at worst, demeaning.

But soliciting acquaintances for a job is not the purpose of networking. A network has three functions: 1) It provides candidates a way to distribute consistent information about what kind of jobs they are looking for; 2) It provides a rich source of informational meetings; and most importantly 3) It provides candidates access to interviewers' business contacts and can move resumes from the "Unsolicited" pile, almost certainly destined for the shredder, to the "Arrange an Interview" pile.

So take heart as you venture forth with your freshly minted diploma. Adhering to the above guidelines will put you ahead of the pack of recent graduates all competing for the same jobs.

D.A. Hayden and Michael Wilder are founding partners of Hayden-Wilder, a one-on-one counseling firm specializing in preparing recent college graduates for the real world job market. For more information about Hayden-Wilder, visit www.haydenwilder.com.