I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cover letter from a candidate in over 25 years of interviewing. They’re maybe seen by HR, but long stripped before the interviewer in my experience.
I have seen every cover letter accompanying a job application in every company I have worked for but I have never worked for a company with more than 200 employees or so.
Strange. I've worked in startups my entire career, hired over 100 developers and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of cover letters I've seen.
Well cover letter has somewhat been replaced by an introduction email, no?
True. But there are still recommendations to email with a coverletter.pdf AND a resume.pdf. Maybe developers in Toronto don't follow those rules ...
For me, it varied. In the beforetimes, sometimes I walked into the first onsite interview and the technical interviewer had printed it out!
I can only think of a couple of times where HR decided the cover letter was worth including with the resume in a very similar time frame.