People take you at your own estimation of your worth.
You need to present as the value you are.
Focus is all important

There is no such thing as good enough when your career is at stake. The letter, CV, statement, website or email you use to apply MUST be a perfect representation of who you are, what you have achieved, what vision and insight you bring to your work, how you manage the tasks, strategies and relationships you work with and what you are likely to be contributing in the future.

Anything less than that fails to honour yourself and is unlikely to catch the eye, engage the mind and touch the heart of the people out there who are looking for someone like you to join them.

It is a huge error to be lazy or casual about the way you present yourself; it is a common error to be inaccurate and very few people ask for too much from life: the most common fault is not to expect enough. Life is a mirror; what you put out has a relationship to what you get back. It needs to clearly establish your value; issues that might block your progress need to be dealt with in a mature way and not left until they become an embarrassing disclosure; things that you have started upon that show your potential should be included, even if they are not yet complete.

When your CV arrives it will be looked at by people who can tell at a glance what it signifies. Make sure it sends them the right message and then reinforces it in a totally professional way.

Over many years as a CV author I have come across one core distinction between people with exceptional careers and everyone else.

The most effective ones among us generally take action when the time is right and they are somehow ready. Such people can prosper even if they start life without much in the way of qualifications. Sometimes they have been loyal to one or few employers. They have proven themselves and been offered chances, which they have been well placed to take advantage of. Their approach to career issues reflects this personal maturity and they are clear about objectives, dignified in their contacts, impressive to others, able to ask the right questions and get the desired responses...

The rest of the population, by contrast, is never quite ready and always scrambling against a negative influence. Some have huge ideas, beyond their ability to deliver; some are always caught off guard by takeovers, redundancies, movements in the marketplace; some have become complacent; many are angry at their own lack of achievement and their job applications contain a sulky righteousness that growls quietly through the text as a hidden sub-plot... and some are just hoping their distance learning MBA will fix the problem !

If you are only human what you need badly is an insight into what effective people do so that you can model their behaviour. This is not an easy proposition, but at least you can start with written application materials that don't let you down, that are sent to the right people for the right reason in the right mood or spirit of adventure.

The first thing to know is that recruitment agencies get their fees from employers and are motivated to find people for employers, not the other way round; hence random and careless distribution of your CV is not likely to yield quality results, nor are halfhearted applications to jobs you don't really match.

There are some excellent recruiters in the world and well placed letters with well-designed CVs can yield amazing results, but it needs to be executed with self-evident quality and you need to establish some kind of dialogue with the people you approach. They are human and they appreciated humanity; they dislike being treated as a low value resource, which is why they are always complaining about being sent irrelevant CVs that don't address what they said they were looking for.

As a CV writer I always create a perfect template CV and very rarely change it for specific jobs because what is wrong with CVs is not what recruiters say is wrong at all... in general what is wrong is that they are boring, uncreative, poorly designed, badly prioritised and above all: lacking in a warm and convincing human narrative that gets the story across quickly.

Many CVs sound like they have been borrowed from job definitions and as we all know, job definitions do not define jobs, they exist to protect employers in case they need to make you redundant and launch a disciplinary...

The bare facts of the roles you might perform are not what you do for a living. What you do for a living is contribute, create, communicate, persuade, organise, change, consolidate, develop, support, mentor, make accessible, provide, define, service, collaborate and...

And your CV, which can avoid normal grammatical rules by the way (so switch your Word 97 checker OFF)... needs to be telling people why, how and with what result you did and will do what wonderful things you can do...

Without resorting to unsubstantiated bullet point superlatives and yucky Americanisms... without mentioning things so far below your present status that they pull you down and make you look stupid for not being able to position yourself...

If you can do this simple thing you will establish dialogue with recruiters and achieve the reflection that the successful find in the world. If you cannot do this, then pay an expert to show you what it feels like to present as a new and successful you. The confidence that can be derived from knowing that how you present yourself has been truly focused and optimised will brighten your career search and boost you at interview.