Depending on whom you ask, cover letters are either an absolutely critical part of setting yourself apart and landing a new job — or they’re a dying convention and a waste of time.
Frankly, I’ve tended to lean towards the latter camp for years. While obviously there are special situations where a cover letter is warranted, and you’d always want to submit one if an employer explicitly asks you to do so, in cases where a cover letter isn’t specifically requested — or a company says it’s “optional” — I probably wouldn’t take the time to include one.
There are several reasons I’ve come to this conclusion:
1) The majority of recruiters and hiring managers I talk to say they rarely, if ever, read them anymore. It seems that most companies end up receiving so many resumes for advertisements these days that they can barely get through THOSE documents, much less an extra attachment.
2) In general, most cover letters add very little in the way of new information and simply regurgitate the content already on one’s resume, so employers don’t tend to find much “added value” in reading these extra documents.
3) Cover letters can also often hurt a person’s chances, more than help, given that many of them have typos in them, aren’t written well, or contain glitches the writer overlooked such as failing to change the name of the company or job title to the proper one — or accidentally leaving in some content from a prior letter that’s not appropriate to the current opportunity.
4) And lastly, I think the final death blow to cover letters is likely going to be AI, given that the majority of letters I come across today seem AI-generated — which gives them a very generic feel and again, usually results in them not containing any original, interesting, or relevant content given that the AI tool simply reshuffles the existing data already on the person’s resume.
On this latter note, in fact, I recently reviewed a cover letter that my wife had submitted to her organization and while on the surface, it seemed to hit all of the right notes, on closer inspection it appeared to simply be parroting back a bunch of information straight from the job advertisement. Intrigued, I quickly ran it through an AI detection site called ZeroGPT and the letter came back with a 98.7% likelihood of being AI-generated!
Don’t get me wrong, as I’ve mentioned in prior blogs there’s certainly nothing wrong with using AI for certain purposes and/or to give your writing a quick nudge, but if the majority of job hunters today take the lazy way out and produce all of their documents using such tools, what’s the point? Virtually every letter will sound roughly the same (as is already happening) and employers will realize that there’s no real purpose to asking for such correspondence anymore if all they’re going to get back is a pile of computer-generated cliches and happy-talk.
In closing, I’d love to hear anybody else’s thoughts on the matter, but again, I’ve come to the point that I recommend clients only submit cover letters when explicitly mandated to do so. And in those cases that an employer requests such a document, I recommend they write them from scratch and really put some thought into the key points they can share to show they’re a great fit and that will grab the reader’s attention with some “new” information they haven’t yet seen. Short of that, again, what’s the real point?
Hi Matt,
I have been dealing with this question/issue recently in trying to fill a position. What about asking for a cover letter that specifically asks to address what it is about the job posting that is of the most interest and address ones short term, if not long term, goals. Otherwise just getting inundated with resumes hasn’t seemed like a good way to figure out which ones to reach back out to. To me it seems like people are just using some sort of AI bot or other to send their resume into any job posting that contains certain words. Results in lots of resumes that don’t have very much in common with the job posting.
I agree with you, Matt. When one is required, or it makes sense for some reason unique to that job, I advise people to be concise and to the point, with a handful of actual examples that correlate directly to key position requirements . The exception to that is where somebody is applying for a role in academia or when writing matters in the job, etc. Thank-you for the article.
Hi Matt,
I believe for small companies or outside recruiters like me, a personalized cover letter has more of a chance of being read. It’s helpful if someone is applying under a special circumstance like wanting a step down, transferring to a new specialization, etc. If its a communications role and it gives the candidate an opportunity to stand out with their writing skills (then it certainly shouldn’t be AI generated and identical to the other letters). For the most part though, recruiters don’t have time to read them so its not worth the time to write one.
I would love to add that if the application system is asking a few questions, its worth the time to answer them. Many candidates don’t and it will give you fewer people to compete with for the position.
Chris
I agree – no cover needed. I work in human resources, we all have too many demands and too little time.