Cover letters are the worst. Do hiring managers really read them?
Most companies (including the one I was hiring for) cannot compete on price[1], so they only way they can hire a particularly desirable candidate is if they find a particular fit between candidate and company/role. A strong cover letter is a strong leading indicator of a potential fit, so it is very desirable.
[1] - I think the money is there and the economics probably work out to "just pay programmers more" but there are social factors that make this strategy unviable. In particular, most firms are very averse to paying programmers more than the non-technical staff to whom they report so the wage ceiling for programmers at a firm end up being capped to the market-clearing price for those business professionals.
So few? Just to make sure, does the body of the email counts as a cover letter? I always put mine there, surely that doesn't make it invisible?
Such blatant stupidity is hard do fathom.
It makes it perfectly visible, to the person who receives your email. After that only your attached resume is printed or passed on to other decision makers.
Putting your "cover letter" in body of an email is anywhere from bad to worse practice, depending on the initial recipient of your email (hiring manager vs low level recruiter).
So, the onus is on me to put this information in a place that is less convenient to reach than the body of the email?
This is ridiculous. The onus should be on them not to lose information. Sure, if I need that job badly, I may have to work around their stupidity. Hopefully I have more leeway than that.
Why? Management is just a different kind of skilled labor, not a more important one, and certainly not a less scarce one.
I don't see this as a management vs. engineering situation (especially since in there are plenty of companies that prefer to promote engineers to management rather than hire MBAs or external hires in general). It's more just a human hierarchy situation. The people higher up the hierarchy are held accountable for everything that happens below them in the org chart, even though they are by definition not doing the work of all of those individuals.
That's a functional hierarchy, of course. In a dysfunctional hierarchy, it's more like a pyramid scheme and the higher up you are, the easier it is for you to escape scrutiny by blaming those below you. All orgs I've worked in have been somewhere on the functional/dysfunctional spectrum, nothing's 100% good or 100% bad. There really are no ideal ways to get groups of people to work together towards a shared goal without introducing things which are injustices when seen in isolation, whether there's a hierarchy or a flat org or what have you. I hope someone figures out a better solution but I'm not holding my breath- like democracy and capitalism, it's the worst system in the world except for every other system that humans have been able to come up with.
The candidate is generally forced to take the job description and riff from that about how their skills/experience are applicable. The problem is two-fold, first they lack deep context on the situation so land-up writing either off-base or just 'marketing' stuff about how they're the solution to the problem. It's not the candidates fault (or the job description) that the implications of assumptions will be wrong - it's just too early on.
Second, if I can't work out how their skills/expertise might be applicable to the actual problems I have (since I know the context), then I probably shouldn't be the hiring manager!
I read them because I recognise the effort that candidates are putting into creating them, and on occasion you get a clearer picture of the career arc behind the titles.
Where it may help more is for entry level roles where by the nature of the stage of career/life there's not much in a CV. In those circumstances providing some insight and background helps to clear the first hurdle, basically the "why would I spend an hour with you?" question.
You should consider hiring people because good candidates are hard to find. And if you want to know whether or not they're a good fit for the position, engage them in a conversation and ask. Don't expect applicants to do your job for you, the good candidates have better things to do than write you a letter before you even bother to talk to them.
You can increase your chances of getting hired at a specific company by tenfold of you focus your efforts. Usually this means getting to know people at the company, understanding which departments and projects you may fit.
For example, I am a graduate software engineer. There are a lot of companies that I have a more than sincere interest in working for - I have a near obsession for working for, say, Google, Amazon, Dropbox, or Facebook. I also have a desire to pay my bills. All 4 of the above have rejected me for "lack of years of experience," and so now what? Find more companies I sincerely want to work for? At this point, a company with a software engineering team I can learn from fits the bill, of which there's probably 3,000 in the Bay Area alone. So, I don't understand how my options at this point are anything other than literally sending out 3,000 resumes (I'm at 80 now). Other than, of course, extensive networking, which I also do.
Are you honestly sure that writing a cover letter is a good signal?
The standard advice is to submit a cover letter, so many standard candidates spraying applications do. There's someone just a few comments over who wrote 53 cover letters when applying to jobs.
You still think cover letters are about focus?
I absolutely agree with your last sentence though. Bypassing the initial resume screen by talking to an actual engineer makes far more sense, but frankly you don't want to be too aggressive about it because then random people will start pestering your engineers all the time just to be considered.
That's me, we're in the comment chain for it right now. I don't understand what else I can do to get a job as someone a.) new to the city and b.) a graduate software engineer with no prior experience other than personal and group projects. None of my "passion about" companies will take me - dropbox rejected me in 30 minutes flat, probably automatically. What can I do but spray out absurd amount of resumes? What can I do but have an auto-generated cover letter that swaps out COMPANY_NAME and JOB_TITLE so I can crank out enough resumes a day to ensure I get a job before my bills swamp me?
You can increase your chances of an interview marginally through a significant investment of time, but you'll get more interviews by spraying resumes. Especially good candidates with valuable skills.
I consider the cover letter important when I'm a hiring manager. It shows that you're interested enough in the job to try for it, to make a bit of effort. I've never been in a position where there were few enough applicants that I could have a conversation with every one of them - the cover letter is a brief of their half of that first 'why should you work here' discussion.
My opinion goes the opposite way when I am being aggressively recruited. So, I think it's on the person asking for something (to be offered a job, or to leave a current job) that should be showing their willingness to make the sale.
Again. That is your problem to solve, not theirs. Good candidates don't need to worry about making sure you see them, they'll either just work for a different company where they happen to have more friends or they'll bypass the first line hiring process entirely by calling up a colleague and telling them to make sure whoever is doing the hiring bothers to call them back.
I always thought that the resume should explain why someone would want to hire me ("look, I'm smart, know some stuff, and did some cool things!"), while the cover letter explains why you in particular want to hire me.
I had very good look writing cover letters where I pulled apart the job description and explained how my experience (described on the attached resume) fit with each of the requirements.
And no, I did not write cover letters. A short phone / email exchange usually told the company if I'm an on-site interview material, and equally told me whether the company is worth being interviewed with.
I have a colleague who gets really annoyed with bad cover letters when we're interviewing and considers not taking the effort to make it good enough of a reason to reject someone (or at least count is severely against them).
Personally I don't care much about your ability to write something that sounds good. So write them and make them good, because you don't know who of us you're interviewing with I guess (metaphorically).
I'm a programmer not a writer, give me a system to create, don't make me write books :)
Humans move their eyes every few hundred milliseconds and you can only read a handful of words after each eye movement, so this suggests that they read about a hundred words total, and probably a lot less if you factor in "seeking" time (e.g., to find the section headings).
http://cdn.theladders.net/static/images/basicSite/pdfs/TheLa...
People typically read ~200-300 words per minute. 100 words is a lot more than what you end up reading on most CVs when you go through a pile. You basically scan a CV for a few seconds and move on to the next unless something caught your interest. When so you actually spend a few minutes reading the whole thing - bringing the average to, indeed, under 10s per CV. If HR did its job before sending CVs your way the average is much higher of course.