![]() If you’re still stumped, pretend you’re writing an email to a friend about why you’d be great at the job. ![]() Those sorts of details illustrate what you bring to the job in a different way than your résumé does, and they belong in your cover letter. Maybe you’re regularly sought out by more senior people to help problem-solve, or you find immense satisfaction in bringing order to chaos. Maybe your co-workers called you “the client whisperer” because of your skill in calming upset clients. Or maybe your last boss told you that you were the most accurate data processor she’d ever seen, or came to rely on you as her go-to person whenever a lightning-fast rewrite was needed. And that’s not something you could put on your résumé, but it can go in your cover letter. For example, if you’re applying for an assistant job that requires being highly organized and you neurotically track your household finances in a detailed, color-coded spreadsheet, most hiring managers would love to know that because it says something about the kind of attention to detail you’d bring to the job. Instead, your cover letter should go beyond your work history to talk about things that make you especially well-suited for the job. And if you think about it, your entire application is only a few pages (in most cases, a one- or two-page résumé and a one-page cover letter) – why would you squander one of those pages by just repeating the content of the others? This makes no sense – hiring managers don’t need a summary of your resume, because your resume is on the very next page! They’re about to see it as soon as they scroll down. The most common mistake people make with cover letters is that they simply use them to summarize their resume. Whatever you do, don’t just summarize your résumé. Your cover letter is supposed to give a window into those things.Ģ. But of course, other things matter, too - things like personal traits, work habits, communication skills, people skills, intelligence, drive, and enthusiasm for the job. We could just hire based on résumés alone. If it were, we wouldn’t ask for cover letters at all - hell, we might not even need interviews. First, understand the point of a cover letter.įor employers, picking the best candidate for the job isn’t just about skills and experience. It’s worth putting in the effort to do them well, so let’s learn how!ġ. (If you’re thinking that sounds like really boring reading, you’re right.) What I can tell you from doing that is that most people make the same mistakes over and over, and they waste the opportunity cover letters give them to make a case for why they’d be great at the job.Īs someone who advises job-seekers, this is frustrating – because if you do it the right way, a cover letter can make you stand out from your competition and significantly boost your chances of getting an interview. I’ve read a lot of cover letters in my career - thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google
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