Hacker News Reader

Comment by JTBooth | Hacker News Reader

Cover letters that just say how much you love the company are pretty useless. Cover letters that provide additional information about why you're a good use of the company's interviewer's time are useful. I've submitted letters about, say, how I think one project on my resume is specifically applicable to a problem the company has. This both shows I researched the company, which is proof of investment from me, and provides some evidence that I should work at this particular company (or I could have done bad research and misunderstood the company and what it wants, in which case it will help them reject me and help me find my way to a company I'm more interested in)

View on HN

The problem is that many job descriptions are too vague for me to be able to decide if I will be a good fit. The story I’d like to be able to tell is I did X at company X, I can do X+delta at company Y but your job description doesn’t give me any information about the thing you want me to accomplish. Simply put, it’s not a description of the job, it’s a description of your HR filters.

I’m not going to write a cover letter about how good of a fit I am for your job if you don’t give me enough information to understand what your job is. Most job descriptions are 90% useless. What I need to know is, what is the problem you need me to solve, and what resources will I have to solve it. If you as a recruiter do not know that, you’re not the right person to write a job description.

Exactly. Competent recruiters and hiring managers at companies that I actually considered working for even explicitly told me to not waste my time on the cover letter (which was optional for their applications), unless I am a PhD with a long list of publications and specialized experience that would be too much to explain on my resume (or any other non-traditional type of an applicant that cannot easily relay their relevant expertise on the resume, e.g., former air traffic controller who is trying to break into software dev; or maybe if you have tons of experience in their very specific obscure niche).

For all other scenarios, cover letters seem pointless and redundant at best, and “i wanna see how much you are willing to suck up to the company” at worst.

...did you reply to the wrong post?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com