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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

I just went through a round of applications recently. Luckily I got hired from someone reaching out to me on HN, because the experience was fairly miserable.

More often than not, they’d ask for my LinkedIn, which I’d assume would pull in my resume. But no no no, I then had to manually enter all of my past experience. When you have over a decade of relevant experience, this is quite cumbersome.

By the end of each application, I was so irritated that I declined to submit a cover letter to any of them. No one has time for that.

Out of 12 applications, I got 7 flat out rejections and 5 no-responses. I chalk it up to the cover letter, but I’m sticking to my guns on this. Cover letters aren’t useful these days, especially when platforms such as GitHub exists.

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FWIW, I spoke with 5 recruiter friends about cover letters while I was applying last year.

Their stance: ain't no one got time for that – unless it's a tiny company. Each of the 5 said they never ever read cover letters, but allowed that truly small startups, who are thus extremely selective, may put some weight into them.

Cover letters are useful for two types of candidates:

Fresh our of college (or even looking for an internship), or other non-traditional path to a technical job, where you don't have experience and need to convince me you are technical enough to interview. (this also covers people who have large gaps trying to get back into something technical)

Candidates who know they are over qualified and need to explain why they would accept the position anyway, and thus it isn't a waste of our time to interview you for a position that can't pay something reasonable.

Otherwise I read them, but they don't tell me anything. I want to see evidence you have done technical things like the type of things we need someone to do. Your resume should give me a better indication of what you can do because it is what you are doing.

The fresh out of college situation is a good point - I’d recommend a cover letter in that scenario. There isn’t enough experience to assess a candidate so makes sense to counter it with a letter.

With fresh out of college you have a degree in computer engineering just like the other 20 applicants for the one position. What you need is some reason - any - to stand out. Otherwise we will randomly interview until someone passes the interview and if you end up last on the random list you won't get an interview as odds are one of the first 5 accepts an offer. If you can stand out you can get to the top of the list, and that gives you a better chance.

When you get more experience, your experience speaks for itself. (not always a good thing - if you want to change from embedded development to front end for example you will be overlooked even though there is no reason someone cannot make that change quickly)

One other case I've seen of a 'useful' cover letter was from someone who wanted to completely change fields. The cover letter explained while they had no education on the field and had never worked in the field, they where passionate about it and spent the past several years of free time doing it as hobby. That was enough to get them an interview, despite their 'irrelevant' CV, and the interview was good enough to get them hired

It varies of course – these 5 do not claim to read cover letters in either of those scenarios, and each work for important recruiting firms. They said they simply look at too many candidates a day to possibly be able to read cover letters regularly.

Depending on the person, the time spent writing a cover letter may be better put to just more applications.

Professional CV:

I have experience. I am willing to work in exchange for fiat. I look forward to joining the team.

Seriously though, read the fucking resume. I am not here to stroke an hiring manager's corpo boner on how gratified I am for the opportunity to apply to wagery nor will I be conflating my world view on being part of a TEAM. I give you a service, you give me money. We are not friends, we are not family, this is business.

I don't know, as an employer I would do optional cover letters, so it is up to you if you want to provide one. If you don't, it is an instant reject, because it just shows that my company is not interesting enough for you to even write a measly cover letter. Obviously depends, if I just need mercenaries I would not require cover letters.

I can kind of understand the sentiment, but as we’re all discussing in this thread, it takes serious time to fill out applications. The reality is that applicants are submitting their applications to dozens of companies. It’s a significant burden to write a long form letter for each individual company.

Plus, it’s just kind of dishonest to have a requirement and list it as optional. No offense but that sounds toxic.

But my time is valuable, even as an employee, or prospective employee, and the reasons why you should hire me are listed right there on my resume. I should not have to give a reason why I want to work there, or I would not have turned in an application.

Cover letters are a waste of my time.

If writing a cover letter for a company where you want to work for the next 3 to 5 years is a waste of your time, well, there would be no place for you in my company.

I guess it depends how interesting your company is. If you have a great company, than maybe you can afford to filter out based on cover letter. I would suspect most employers don't actually read the cover letter and have it simply as a formality. It is simply another time sink for job applicants: scan the website, try to find out what this company does, insert a few custom sentences into your cover letter template about you are exited to work on the {insert specific tech} here. I don't buy that it signals much of anything, but I could be wrong.

I am not an employer, so I don't know if that would be an effective strategy. But I DO know that the few times I actually were happy to write a cover letter, I was really interested in the company.

So how do you filter for that? You cannot make the cover letter required, because as you said yourself, that doesn't signal anything then. Anyone can write a decent cover letter if forced to. So the best way is to make it optional. If you don't get enough people writing cover letters with that strategy, you can still change it and look at applications without cover letter. Or you just use the cover letter as one of many signals in addition to the resume.

Personally I wouldn't want to work for a company that doesn't state its requirements up front and likes to play games like explicitly marking things optional when they're actually required

How would you know? Companies aren't going to tell you they rejected you because you failed to fill out an informally required field that was marked optional.

Problem solved then!

I agree that recruiting shouldn't involve playing games -- but also, the ability to identify inferred requirements is a pretty useful soft skill for a software developer.

This is just deceptive as you're saying it's optional but rejecting people behind the scenes. Stop wasting peoples' time and just mark it as required.

So then how is the cover letter optional? You're just wasting the time of everyone who applied with a cover letter.

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