Cover Letters: Always Send One | Hacker News Reader

Cover Letters: Always Send One

blog.doismellburning.co.uk

30 pointsmostlystatic20 comments

The site appears to be down, so my comment is without having read the actual article.

As someone who is involved in the hiring process pretty regularly, I would say about 10% of the resumes we receive come with cover letters, but only a small fraction of those letters make it obvious that they've been tailored to our company. Maybe 3 out of 10 will do this. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, half the cover letters we do receive are not unique to us.

Honestly it's probably better not to send a cover letter than it is to send one you've copied and pasted from the internet or that you're sending in identical copies to 50 employers. We don't count not sending a cover letter against anyone, but a bad one can hurt your chances of a phone call.

In my experience though, a good, unique cover letter will all but guarantee you an in-person interview. We'll do an initial phone screen that is mostly for baseline technical competence (talk about projects, etc, we're not going over algorithms or anything here), then a single panel interview that we try to keep under 1 hour and are successful with the majority of the time.

> In my experience though, a good, unique cover letter will all but guarantee you an in-person interview.

I wish. The amount of time I put in to an application seems to have no bearing on my almost-nonexistent response rate, so I rarely bother with much effort anymore.

I have actually seen an inverse relationship with the amount of time invested in the application process. I spend 45 minutes laboriously transferring every little detail already on my resume into the fill-in forms of their candidate blackholing system, also upload my resume, and include a cover letter: no contact.

I locate my HTML resume on my file system and click "send": I get an e-mail response within days, and take the first call the same week.

So I'm willing to write a custom cover paragraph. I say where I saw the job posting and the single detail in it that most influenced my choice to respond.

But I only do so at the end, if the application process hasn't already gone over 20 minutes.

I had met someone who had a 3 page cover letter containing her life story. That's not going to work. Spend a little time, so it looks like you're not just sending your resume on every remotely relevant job, but not too much time they think you've got no other choice.

There is no reason to send a non-boilerplate cover letter to a large company, especially given the fairly high likelihood that it's either processed by a machine or discarded entirely. The lack of transparency about what happens to cover letters is even more discouraging, so maybe you should put a little note in your careers page that you prefer no cover letter to a boilerplate one.

On the other hand, if it's a small company and the CEO/CTO/Hiring Manager is <firstname>@<companyname>.com, then a meaningful cover letter that's not more than 2-3 paragraphs has a good chance of getting a response of some kind.

In my most recent job search, all followup came from going to events, meetups, or hackathons and gaining contacts that way. I figured out that spending 3 hours a day trying to compose meaningful cover letters could be better spent going to events talking with people, although this is only an option for people in certain cities.

Always send a cover letter. Resumes are form content, by themselves they do not offer enough differentiation from the next joker with a word processor. The cover letter is the easiest and most traditional way to define yourself as more than a bunch of facts.

Part of working at a company is getting good at written communication. It should not be a lot of work to whip up a personalized cover letter for each company you apply to, assuming you're not just putting your resume on blast. If it feels like it is, then you should work on those skills rather than just cop out of the responsibility.

I'm probably unusual, but I have major writer's block and anxiety when writing about myself. I can write clear, detailed communications about nearly anything with little effort, but it takes me 45 minutes to write three paragraphs about myself.

Don't write about yourself then, write about your enthusiasm for the job.

Well, the beauty is that you only have to do it once. Nobody that receives a cover letter from you is likely to see another one you ever send out, so it's okay if they have some of the same content.

I personally keep each cover letter I write in a Google doc. When I have to whip up a new one I just go back and find some useful bits that apply to the position I'm interested in. That gets the ball rolling enough that the last 15% is easy to get through.

I only have so many skills I want to highlight in a cover letter, so having 10-15 sentences already laying around to cherry pick from gets me 80% of the way there on new letters.

I'm interested in how recent college grads handle this. From what I read on Reddit, its normal now to apply to ~200 positions during your senior year before you find a job. I would never want to write 200 cover letters (or even apply to 200 places).

When I graduated 6 years ago, I applied to a total of 5 companies.

Honestly I've reviewed a lot of applications, working for a small non-profit, then a large tech company, and now a tech start-up. I never read the cover letter, and the recruiters rarely pass them on to me. And it never makes a difference.

Here's the problem with the cover letter: the dominant strategy is to describe that you're a natural fit for the job, which sends up all sorts of BS flags in the reader.

The alternative, suggested here, is to be a little self-deprecating. Mention why you might not be the perfect candidate, but you'll shine anyway. Have you heard of price anchoring? It's everywhere, and if you start the hiring manager off with "could take a chance on this person, maybe a diamond in the rough" ... well, that's not a great place to start.

So if you're writing a cover letter, I'd recommend you make it sound like you're perfect for the job. But the strongest feature is "I've been doing this at my last job and want to do it somewhere else." That's a hard thing to make up if you don't have it already. And either way, it's not unique -- the "best" cover letter for a job is generally pretty discernible from the job posting. Which makes that cover letter table stakes and doesn't set you apart from the crowd of candidates they're actually going to talk to.

> And either way, it's not unique -- the "best" cover letter for a job is generally pretty discernible from the job posting. Which makes that cover letter table stakes and doesn't set you apart from the crowd of candidates they're actually going to talk to.

I really don't think that most people even send a cover letter, much less put that much effort into determining what the 'best' such letter to send is.

Life isn't a poker game, 99% of your success comes from just showing up. Most people don't even do that.

I'd say for large companies(Google, Fb, MSFT, etc), theres no need to send a cover letter. These companies get thousands of applications every single recruiting cycle. Is it even possible for HR to review every single cover letter? Anecdotally, I've had many friends get interviews with big companies without sending a cover letter so not having a cover letter probably won't hurt your case.

For small companies/startups, a cover letter is probably a good idea though.

Yeah I disagree when sending a cover letter to a big company. When you send in your resume, it will take on a life of it's own and honestly this can work in your favor. The resume gets passed around by HR and hiring manager to hiring manager. It would be hard to avoid poisoning the thought process of the hiring managers if you have a cover letter attached.

How would a cover letter "poison the thought process of the hiring managers"?

Alternate point of view here from someone who has done a lot of hiring.

I find this advice really odd because it's a struggle to find someone who can actually do the job and you are always desperate for technical talent.

I have never seen any emphasis placed on cover letters or resumes when screening candidates. Instead it's usually things like online coding tests and phone interviews.

I can see this being more important for executive/sales/marketing positions that require soft skills that aren't easily gauged.

Let me try; :)

Hi, I'm John Doe

I saw your ad for Backend Software Developer at LaterPay and was very interested, because I believe paying for digital content should be fast, convenient, and fair. I think people should be able to buy the exact piece of content they want.

As a Software Developer who lives in Slack and keeps code in GitHub, I really enjoy running stuff in AWS.

and so on and so forth :) It all sounds like BS for me

Cover letter should be short: one or two sentences. One sentence is better than two.

Just briefly explain why this job interests you and give a hint of why you is a potential match.

No. I hate receiving them it's just garbage. Resumes' themselves are garbage. They tell no stories and give no information in the tech field.

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