Comment by aftoprokrustes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aftoprokrustes | Hacker News Reader

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Apparently everyone here hates cover letters, so I would like to offer a different viewpoint. Every time I am part of the hiring process, I start reviewing each applicant by looking at the cover letter. I only look at the CV if the cover letter convinced me, if at all. I am in a field where people with lots of different backgrounds might contribute, and the cover letter allows me to see whether the applicant understood what the job is about. You would not believe how many people throw applications without having the slightest idea of what they are applying to.

Even when I apply for jobs, I do not like when I am not able to write a cover letter. My CV alone is nothing special, and I often feel safer with the extra information the cover lwtter allows me to communicate.

Note that I am not a software engineer, and the jobs I review or apply to are very specific and have a few dozen applications at most. I understand the situation would be different for a generic job posting ("software engineer providing support in various teams") with several 100s applications.

Companies can either care about cover letters, or not. Applicants can etiher write genuine, informative letters or generic useless letters.

There are only two possible stable equilibria: a "low" don't care/generic letters or a "high" care / informative letters. If most applicants write generic letters, there's no point for the company to pay attention to it. If companies don't pay much attention to it, there's no point in wrtiting more than the blandest, lowest effort letter.

Sounds like you're in a field in the "high" equilibrium. Most of the software industry is in the "low" equilibrium.

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Personally I like cover letters (in the "high" equilibrium of course):

- they basically front load a lot of the interviews, with information that come up in the interviews. I'd rather have as much filtering as possible thourgh the cover letter and CV than in interviews, because it is much more costly for both parties to interview.

- people complain that it overlaps with the content of the CV/resume. The question imho is purely one of presentation: do you want to convey information with full sentences and paragraphs or bullet points? Much like I think powerpoint-style bullet point lists are much worse than actual language to convey rich information, I'd rather have actual text than blurbs in the typical resume. Makes it slower to read and thus requite low number of applicants though.

I like your take.

I’ll add that writing a cover letter is articulating why you are applying and interested in a role. It’s a window into a thought process. It shows someone else how you structure your story, your summarizations, etc. Also, easy way to understand verbosity.

I’m not an SWE by trade so don’t have that experience. But it is useful to practice breaking down your thought process into succinct valuable chunks. In a SWE, it might involve explaining an architectural choice or proposing something new. In sales it might be explaining your pitch approach for a prospect.

My background is actuarial. Highly technical. I spent a lot of time writing why I was doing things. Good then to get a glimpse upfront.

If there are so few applicants to the positions you review, why is it so hard to read their CVs? It takes mere seconds to do a first pass.

I should have mentioned that I only ever was part of the review process for very junior positions (PhD candidates and interns), so all CVs are pretty much the same. So for most, a 10 secs glaze is enough, but whatever the quality of the CV I always feel compelled to read the cover letter with more care.

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