Job searching alone is like hitchhiking a scary ride with an unknown stranger on a 180-mile long deserted, no-exit road with hopes you'll make your destination. When you lack time or expertise to plan career moves carefully, sometimes the loss of ground is not apparent until years later. You can get trapped in a black hole and frustrated that your career is not advancing to full potential. Ever feel imprisoned in positions that lacked adequate reward, satisfaction, challenge or a future?

There are many reasons for these job jails:

? You've become too specialized.

? You've become too generalized.

? You failed to look ahead and plan for the future.

? You held out too long hoping for the "right break."

? You accepted jobs that never made use of your best talents.

? You remain too long in positions that offered no challenge or mobility.

Use these seven job search marketing hacks and you'll get in front of decision makers faster. What's a "hack?" A "hack" is a clever solution to an interesting problem, so says the experts at O'Reilly Media, Inc., a leading-edge book publisher that offers cool technology workarounds on everything from navigating Google and eBay to digital photography and gaming. Hacks are the "down and dirty" of getting a task done. Your mission here is to get a great job, high on adventure, low on headache.

Hack #1: Know the job market.

Locate and identify geographic employment hot spots. Search out emerging industries. Grow up and ditch the pabulum of pursuing comfortable industries that are on their way to obsolescence.

Hack #2: Know your functional and industry options and employers' needs in these areas.

Pinpoint your top three positioning (career focus) alternatives to what you're now doing. Find the chief five employers that serve that market segment.

Hack #3: Know your most marketable skills, competency, and relevant background.

Create a personal branding; the things that make your "package" distinct. Blaze past your competition and neutralize the yawn factor in candidate- selection boredom by linking your portfolio of contribution to employer need.

Hack #4: Know how to win multiple, simultaneous interviews.

Spot the core three strategies to gain exposure that penetrates both the advertised and unadvertised job markets. Isolate which one is used the least but rewards the most, in terms of results.

Hack#5: Know how to create effective resumes and letters that sell solutions.

Build a campaign action plan that sends your tombstone resume to an early grave. Leverage your knowledge to solve employer problems through tailored special-ops marketing tactics that creates "you" stickiness in decision makers' minds.

Hack#6: Know how to multiply your access to those who have the power to hire.

Networking is out. Building strategic relationships is in. Be there?where. Informational meetings with those who have knowledge that you need puts you in the driver's seat when hiring patterns emerge.

Hack #7: Know how to give your inner critic a name and tell it to be quiet.

Visualize the results you want, not the ones you fear. Trigger the right reactions in your targeted prospects by looking for ways you might be sabotaging yourself, then adapt, improvise, overcome.

A professionally-run job search gets you there faster. It gives you defined direction and leverage to compare, negotiate, and deal from strength. Try to imagine the alternative; hitchhiking to nowhere at the mercy of blind luck. Can you think of one rational reason why you'd want to take this trip alone?

Marta L. Driesslein is a senior management consultant for R.L. Stevens & Associates Inc., http://www.interviewing.com, a career marketing firm and organization celebrating over 24 years of providing strategic marketing solutions for its clients' career transitioning needs.