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A very important piece of finding a job, be it your first or not, is submitting a good resume. This simple document briefly sums up your qualifications and compactly and concisely tells a prospective employer what you can do. This is great, and still a very valid part of the equation in finding a job; but that equation is changing. While having a good resume will make sure you get past the first round of cuts, it won’t ensure you get hired.

More and more employers want to see some evidence of things you’ve done, in addition to what your GPA says you should be able to do. Articles like this one demonstrate that having a good academic track record is only a step in the right direction towards getting that lucrative job. You need to bolster your credentials by having some sort of portfolio or record of things that you have done. This poor guy has a 4.0 GPA in his master’s program and a 3.9 in his doctoral program and still relies on his mother for support. Odds are he is just letting his resume do the talking with no additional work to support it.

Depending on what you want to do for a job, any additional submissions you want to make with your resume will vary. If you want to be a financial analyst, show your employer your own portfolio or pick some stocks and track them for a 6-month period, providing analysis along the way. Submitting your personal blog about bird watching probably won’t be relevant here. If you want to be in digital media, graphics design or a similar field, why not have a personal website to display your work?

What if you don’t have a blog or a website to demonstrate the things you’ve been doing? Go register yourname.com, or yourname.org if it is still available and even if you have no real web-building experience, with a little persistence you can get the basics up there. Maybe your resume looks similar to 15 other candidates for a journalism job, but you’ve had a blog you’ve been operating for 3 years – show your employer!

Even if you don’t have a lot of experience on the web, or don’t think a blog would be relevant to your intended career, do something that shows initiative and passion. Spending a few hours on a Saturday afternoon setting up a personal website or beginning a stock tracking project could be all you need to separate yourself from the pack. Doesn’t that sound worth it?

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