Nearly 4 million green-collar jobs could open up in the U.S. in coming decades. How can you land one? Submit a stellar cover letter, and you’ll vastly improve your chances.

A lot of employers put great stock in these tidy summaries of why you want a green job and why your qualifications make you the best candidate. Follow general guidelines for good cover letter writing. Make sure to tailor each letter to the specific job you seek. (Generic letters reek of resume blitzes from people looking for any old job.)

After that? Green up your letter with these rules of thumb.

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Spend money on your resume — a simple one- or two-page document? How could a stranger possible write about your background and achievements? For many people, the idea of having a resume professionally written seems like a waste of money — or, at best, an expense that will get you a questionable product. If you’re among these naysayers, we’ll be blunt — you couldn’t be more wrong. A professionally written resume is one of the very best investments you can make in your job search. Here are a few things a professional resume writer can do for you:

1. Provide outstanding writing skills

Though a resume isn’t supposed to be a work of literary merit, it’s essential that your resume is grammatically correct, free from spelling and punctuation errors, and written in a dynamic, compelling style. A professional resume writer is not only a grammar expert — he or she is also highly skilled in selecting exciting language and phrasing that will make you stand out from the pack. Don’t mistake such skills for lying or exaggerating — a professional resume writer never fabricates or aggrandizes your work. Instead, he or she takes what you’ve done and writes about it in the most effective possible way.

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You’ve spent hours on your resume. You’ve written and rewritten. You’ve showed it to friends, family, and colleagues, and you’ve made change after change. But is your painstakingly created resume really serving you well? Here are 5 of the most common resume mistakes, and how you can fix them:

1. Not enough white space

Reading a resume isn’t much like reading a book, but there is one similarity: big blocks of text are a turn-off, and may actually turn readers away. It’s imperative to design your resume with plenty of white space to facilitate skimming and ensure that the main facts stand out. Use headings, line breaks, and bullets to break up the page and draw your readers’ eyes forward. And remember: a professional resume isn’t a comprehensive life history. If one position’s entry is going much longer than about 6-10 lines of text, it’s time to do some cutting.

2. Failing to separate tasks from achievements

One way to ensure that your resume is skimmable and that your main achievements stand out is to clearly separate your day-to-day job tasks from your key accomplishments. Putting your accomplishments into a bulleted list is the best way to do this. Bulleted lists make skimming a breeze for busy readers. A word of warning, though: don’t get carried away. Five bullets per position are almost always sufficient, and fewer than that is fine.
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