An excellent resume doth not a successful job search make. Three other influencing factors are the ads to which you are responding, your cover letter, and your interviewing skills. In fact, not only are three additional components, they all four are intimately intertwined.

The ads to which you respond should to be closely aligned with what you’ve done. Reach too high or miss too many of the requirements, and you’re knocked out. Stick to making sure that you’ve got minimum 80% of what the company is asking for. But balance that out with some common sense. If the company wants three to five years experience and you have two, and most of the other requirement, go ahead. But if they say eight to ten years experience, and you have two, even possessing all the other factors won’t fly.

No matter how good your resume is, if you’ve selected ads that are a long shot, you’re not going to get in the door. It doesn’t matter if the job is something you want to do, or are sure you can do it. If you’ve very little basis in reality, what you think doesn’t matter, because it’s about what the company thinks. They’re the one who are hiring. They’re the ones who get to write the rules.

The exception is if you’ve been doing something parallel. For instance, the function is the same, but the industry is different. Then the need for a superb cover letter is paramount, and your resume had better be excellent, because they work in tandem.

Theoretically, the job of the cover letter is to whet the hiring authority’s appetite for the resume. The cover letter needs to provide one or two specific examples from your background of what the company is looking for. It also needs to cover, on a general basis, a few other factors from the ad. This way, the cover letter says, "I’ve done these two specific things you want, and I’ve also been involved with these other things. Read my resume for more specific information!"

Unknown to many job hunters, the hiring authority has formed an opinion about your resume (read: you) before he’s even begun to skim it. If the cover letter was boring and generic, he’s fairly predisposed to not liking your resume, even if it’s visually appealing and beautifully written. And if it’s cramped or contains daunting blocks of text, the visual validates an already formed opinion, and you’re lucky if you get more than a two-second eye flick.

Unfortunately, too many cover letters are general with no specifics, or have too many specifics with no resulting benefits, or completely ignore what the company ad says in favor of what the writer wants to relate, which typically means a generic cover letter. So if your experience isn’t dead on with the ad, your resume never gets seen.

If your experience is parallel with what they’re looking for, rather than dead on, it’s your responsibility to use that cover letter to highlight those parallels and spell them out. A generic cover letter won’t cut it. How does your wonderful resume help you there? It doesn’t. You’ve already lost their attention. They’re not going to take the time to figure it out.

And even if your cover letter leads the hiring authority to your resume, and your resume makes him salivate, and you find yourself sitting in his office for an interview, if you can’t close the deal, your sublime resume can’t help you there either. It’s already done its work. The rest is up to you.

The result of that is job seekers who have an abundance of interviews but no offers. They’ve neglected to recognize interviewing skills as an essential part of their search. A great resume is only one fourth of the equation. Any baseball player will tell you that a batting average of .250 is a far cry from that of .1000.