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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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.

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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