Cover letters
Most cover letters go unread. The ones that are read are read for one reason, and it is not enthusiasm.
A cover letter has one purpose that a resume cannot serve: it explains why you are writing to this employer rather than to the thirty others hiring the same role. Everything else it is asked to do — summarise your experience, demonstrate your enthusiasm, restate your skills — is either already on the resume or is not worth a reader's time.
The uncomfortable truth about letters is that whether yours is opened depends less on how good it is than on how the application arrived. A structured graduate form and a direct approach to a forty-person firm are different games, and writing the same careful letter for both is a way of spending most of your preparation time where it cannot pay off.
These two guides split accordingly. One is about what goes in a letter when you write one; the other is about deciding whether to write one at all. The second question is the one that saves more time, so it is worth answering first.
Key terms
- The paste test
- Checking whether a sentence in your letter could be pasted unchanged into an application to a different employer. Anything that passes the paste test is filler — true of you, true of everyone, and occupying space in the only paragraph you can be sure was read.
- Evidence paragraph
- The three or four sentences in a letter that tell one story properly: situation, complication, action, result. It is the only part of an application where a resume bullet can be expanded into something a reader can picture, and it doubles as prepared interview material.
- Speculative application
- An approach to an employer with no advertised vacancy. Here the letter is the entire application rather than an accompaniment to it, and it needs a specific reason to exist — a change at the employer, a referral, or work of theirs you can speak to concretely.
- Structured application form
- A form with its own written questions, scored against a framework, common in graduate recruitment. Where one exists it is the real screening instrument, and the effort most people put into an attached letter belongs in those answers instead.
Frequently asked questions
Are cover letters still worth writing?
In some routes, decisively. A named person reading a small shortlist will read a letter, and a letter with one specific, researched sentence in it is memorable because so few have one. In high-volume routes with a structured form, an attached letter is frequently never opened. The skill is telling the two apart before you spend forty minutes.
What should never go in a cover letter?
Anything the resume already says, adjectives about yourself, salary expectations unless asked, and any sentence that would be equally true in an application to a competitor. The most common waste is the entire first paragraph, spent on enthusiasm that every other applicant also expressed and no reader has ever found persuasive.
Should I use AI to write my cover letter?
It is good at structure and grammar and poor at the one thing that matters, which is the specific, researched sentence about this employer — because that comes from information you gathered, not from the model. Used to tighten prose you have drafted, it helps. Used to generate the letter, it produces something that passes the paste test in every paragraph.
Do I need a different letter for every application?
You need a different first paragraph and a different choice of evidence story. The second and fourth paragraphs are largely stable across applications in the same field. That is fifteen minutes per letter rather than forty, and it is honest: the parts that should be specific are specific, and the parts that describe you do not change between employers.