In the book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, author Seth Godin talks about the importance of being remarkable. He’s talking about building a business and marketing a product, but this advice applies to job searching too. After all, when you’re job searching you are marketing a product (you) to employers.

According to Godin, the opposite of remarkable is not terrible. The opposite of remarkable is “very good.” There are plenty of very good potential employees out there conducting very good job searches. So, when employers have plenty of choices, and they get inundated by piles of resumes, they are less likely to see and respond to your own job search attempts if those attempts are merely very good.

In order to stand out, you need to be better than very good, you need to be remarkable. Remarkable means that you offer something interesting, exceptional and worth investigating. You may be remarkable in your skills, your experience or your education. You may also be remarkable in how you communicate those qualifications to employers.

There are actually plenty of easy ways to stand out from the crowd and be remarkable in your job search.  Most people are content with being very good, so remarkable is rare.  That’s great news for the serious job seeker because it’s easy to stand out from the crowd.  Simply do those things that take a little bit of extra time and effort (like sending a thank you note after an interview) and those things that cause you to work outside of your comfort zone (like conducting some informational interviews). Those are the steps that very good job seekers fail to take, but remarkable job seekers require of themselves.

In a crowded job market, unremarkable can easily lead to failure. Fortunately, there is no shortage of ways to be remarkable in your job search, you simply need to require yourself to step outside of the comfort zone of being very good.