Four paragraphs, each with exactly one job

Four paragraphs, each with one job: why this employer, what you bring, the evidence for it, and the close. With the openings that waste the first one.

The short answer: A cover letter that works has four paragraphs and each one has exactly one job. The first says why this employer specifically, using something you could not have written about a competitor. The second says what you are and the single most relevant thing you have done. The third gives one worked piece of evidence in three or four sentences — the story your resume only had room to summarise. The fourth closes with a clear next step. Under 350 words in total. The most common failure is spending the first paragraph on enthusiasm, which is the one thing every other applicant also has.

Key points

Open with something specific to this employer that you could not paste into another application — that sentence is the whole test.
The letter should add one thing the resume could not carry, not restate the resume in prose.
Three or four sentences of one concrete story beats a paragraph of adjectives about your work ethic every time.
Under 350 words. A letter that fills a page is competing for attention with the resume, and losing.

Four paragraphs, four jobs

What each paragraph is for
Paragraph	Its one job	Length
First	Why this employer, specifically and checkably	2–3 sentences
Second	What you are, and the most relevant thing you have done	2–3 sentences
Third	One piece of evidence, told properly	3–4 sentences
Fourth	The close and the next step	1–2 sentences

Roughly 320 words. If a paragraph is doing two jobs, one of them is being done badly.

The structure is not novel and that is the point. A reader who has opened nine letters this morning is grateful for one that arrives in the shape they expect, because it lets them find what they are looking for without reading every word.

The opening sentence, which is the whole letter

There is one test for a cover letter opening: could you paste this sentence into an application to a different employer without changing anything? If yes, it is doing nothing, and it is occupying the only paragraph you can be confident was read.

Openings that fail the paste test, and their replacements
Fails	Works
I am writing to express my strong interest in the Analyst position at your organisation.	Your move into supply-chain finance last year is the part of transaction banking I have spent two years working in from the corporate side.
I have always been passionate about financial services and admire your commitment to innovation.	I spent eighteen months on the same regulatory remediation your risk function published on, from the vendor side of it.

Finding that sentence takes ten to fifteen minutes of research, which is precisely why most letters do not have one. It is also why the ones that do are noticeable. The same research feeds directly into interview preparation, so it is not spent twice.

The evidence paragraph

This is where a letter earns its place. A resume bullet has room for the outcome and nothing else; the letter has room for the situation, the complication and what you actually did. Pick the one story most relevant to this role and tell it in four sentences.

A resume bullet expanded into an evidence paragraph

The bullet: Cut monthly close preparation from four days to one
Sentence 1 — situation: The close pack was assembled by hand from eleven source files each month.
Sentence 2 — complication: It took four days, and any late correction meant redoing most of it.
Sentence 3 — action: I rebuilt it around a single reconciled input sheet with the checks automated.
Sentence 4 — result: Preparation dropped to a day, and a late correction now costs an hour rather than three days.

Four sentences, no adjectives, and the reader now knows something about how you work that the resume could only assert. This is the same shape as a STAR answer, which is not a coincidence — prepare it once and it serves both.

Choose the story by relevance to this specific role rather than by which one is most impressive. An interviewer reading a letter for a reconciliation-heavy role wants the reconciliation story, even if the acquisition you worked on is the better anecdote. The letter is not a highlight reel; it is an argument that you have already done a version of the thing they need doing, and the closest match makes that argument most efficiently.

The fourth paragraph is the one people over-write. It needs a single sentence stating what you would like to happen next — a conversation — and nothing else. No restatement of your enthusiasm, no summary of the letter above it, no thanks for the reader's time in three clauses. A short close reads as confidence and a long one reads as reluctance to stop, which is the last impression you want to leave.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a cover letter be?

Three hundred to three hundred and fifty words — comfortably under a page with white space around it. The reader has your resume open in another tab and is deciding whether to keep reading. A short letter that says one specific thing is read to the end; a full page of prose is skimmed for the first sentence and abandoned.

How do I open without sounding like everyone else?

Name something concrete about the employer and connect it to your own work in the same sentence. Something they have built, a market they have moved into, a change in how the function is organised. If the sentence would be equally true of three competitors, it is not doing anything — and "I have long admired your commitment to excellence" is true of every company that has ever existed.

Should I address it to a named person?

Yes, if you can find the name without guessing — the hiring manager or the recruiter on the posting. If you cannot, "Dear Hiring Team" is fine and unremarkable. Do not invent a name, and do not use "To Whom It May Concern", which reads as though the letter was written before the job existed. It usually was.