Bragging Right

"It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am."

-- Muhammad Ali

The need for self-promotion in job interviews is indisputable. After all, you're there for one reason: to sell yourself.

But how do you do that when there's a thin line between confident and cocky? The balancing act is tricky, and to teeter toward immodest is to risk alienating people.

Experts say the best way to work around this is -- surprise! -- to show, rather than simply tell.

"I'd much rather hear 'I achieved this and really enjoyed it' than 'I'm great at this,' " says Anne Jones, director of career management at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. "Then it's not so much self-promotion, it's just making things clear."

One mistake that interviewees make, she says, is offering up bits of self-promotion that are irrelevant and not necessarily valuable to a company. But if you can use unusual experiences to demonstrate traits the employer is looking for, all the better. For instance, one student played pro basketball in Europe -- a tangential experience that, told alone, might sound like bragging. But when mentioned as evidence of his capacity for quick decision making and working with a team, the detail made him a memorable candidate.

Of course, the need for self-promotion doesn't end at the interview. Say you get the job. Then what? Do you work hard and wait to be noticed?

Good luck with that.

"You get what you demand, not necessarily what you deserve," says Mikelann Valterra, author of "Why Women Earn Less: How to Make What You're Really Worth" (Career Press, 2004). "You've got to learn to toot your own horn."

When it comes to playing up what you're worth, it's easier said than done. In a 2002 study that examined the starting salaries of students graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with master's degrees, only 7 percent of the women negotiated for more money, compared with 57 percent of the men. The students who negotiated increased their starting salaries by an average of 7.4 percent, or $4,053.

For many women (and men, too), the hesitancy to fight for what they're worth is rooted in a fear of inconveniencing people. Asking for a raise, after all, requires your boss to reconfigure the budget or to haggle with superiors on your behalf. And what if that ticks people off?