This need for a cover letter is essentially asking candidates to tell you how much they love the company and how much they want the job.
Why is this important beyond making the company feel loved?
As a job applicant I’m not going to invest a minute in your company until you’ve read my resume and expressed an interest.
Theres hundreds of companies out there employing who want your time but give nothing back.
I know next thing you'll ask for is a coding test and I’m not doing it. You can blame all the previous companies who wanted a coding test and it turned out to be just burning my time.
No cover letters, no coding tests, no 5 stage interview processes, no “you passed 4 interviews and failed the 5th cause everyone has veto”.
Cover letters that just say how much you love the company are pretty useless. Cover letters that provide additional information about why you're a good use of the company's interviewer's time are useful. I've submitted letters about, say, how I think one project on my resume is specifically applicable to a problem the company has. This both shows I researched the company, which is proof of investment from me, and provides some evidence that I should work at this particular company (or I could have done bad research and misunderstood the company and what it wants, in which case it will help them reject me and help me find my way to a company I'm more interested in)
The problem is that many job descriptions are too vague for me to be able to decide if I will be a good fit. The story I’d like to be able to tell is I did X at company X, I can do X+delta at company Y but your job description doesn’t give me any information about the thing you want me to accomplish. Simply put, it’s not a description of the job, it’s a description of your HR filters.
I’m not going to write a cover letter about how good of a fit I am for your job if you don’t give me enough information to understand what your job is. Most job descriptions are 90% useless. What I need to know is, what is the problem you need me to solve, and what resources will I have to solve it. If you as a recruiter do not know that, you’re not the right person to write a job description.
Exactly. Competent recruiters and hiring managers at companies that I actually considered working for even explicitly told me to not waste my time on the cover letter (which was optional for their applications), unless I am a PhD with a long list of publications and specialized experience that would be too much to explain on my resume (or any other non-traditional type of an applicant that cannot easily relay their relevant expertise on the resume, e.g., former air traffic controller who is trying to break into software dev; or maybe if you have tons of experience in their very specific obscure niche).
For all other scenarios, cover letters seem pointless and redundant at best, and “i wanna see how much you are willing to suck up to the company” at worst.
> This need for a cover letter is essentially asking candidates to tell you how much they love the company and how much they want the job.
No, and that is exactly the wrong sort of cover letter. A cover letter is a letter from the human applicant to the human hiring manager explaining why he feels that he is a good fit for the position. ‘But that’s the resumé!’ you might say. No, a resume is a list of relevant training, skills and previous employment. Although not traditionally machine-readable, a resumé is basically input into a process machine (we want someone who has been programming in Java for twenty years; this candidate has done it for 24; awesome). The cover letter is input to humans.
Humans whom you will potentially be working with, potentially for years. It seems reasonable for them to get an idea of your communication skills and empathy. Exercise that empathy: put your self in their shoes, and imagine what it is like to receive hundreds of resumés. What would you want to receive from a candidate? What would make your hiring decision easier or harder? Having figured that out, communicate it.
> As a job applicant I’m not going to invest a minute in your company until you’ve read my resume and expressed an interest.
It’s a free world. You don’t owe hiring companies anything. Of course, they don’t owe you anything, either. In a booming hiring market, you may find that you can easily find positions without investing in leads; in a softer market, you may find less success.
My cover letter has always been a 3 row 2 column chart. Column 1 is a job requirement/ideal candidate trait from the job post. Column 2 is an example of how I meet that requirement. I limit it to what seem to be the top 3 asks from the company.
The result is a quickly scannable, pretty direct and memorable cover letter.
In our case the job ad says: "Stand out from the crowd and help us get to know you better by including a cover letter. Share your tech interests, explain what drew you to our company, or tell us about any relevant experiences. We're keen to see signs that you've chosen us thoughtfully."
So we aren't looking for a love letter, ideally it'll at least demonstrate that you've read our job listing.
Because at this point I'm pretty sure that 90%+ of the applications we are getting haven't even looked at the job ad, they are just spamming their resume to everything.
They must be posting for a position that doesn’t get much traction. If you got 300 applicants like in more general roles, you can’t say someone will read 50 cover letters, no one has the time, and so sending cover letters for those is a waste of time.
> If you received a notice that your resume had been read, they liked it, and they wanted a cover letter before an interview, would you submit one?
No, because that would mean they didn’t specify that the cover letter would be required ahead of time, and I am not trying to waste my time.
How am I so certain that they didn’t specify it ahead of time? Because I wouldn’t apply in the first place if a cover letter was listed as a requirement on the initial application.
If I am feeling particularly petty or upset about that surprise ask for a cover letter later in the process, I will just ask ChatGPT to write the most generic and useless cover letter for me, and then send it over.
Maybe rather than a cover letter which seems too open ended and come with its own special kind of stress for some people, companies can just ask candidates to fill out a questionnaire that asks for approaches to specific situations that an employee will have to face in this situation?
I think that's a fine approach. It's not uncommon to see a bit of guidance on the cover letter request (calling it 'a paragraph telling us why you'd like to work here' and so on.)
Why is this important beyond making the company feel loved?
As a job applicant I’m not going to invest a minute in your company until you’ve read my resume and expressed an interest.
Theres hundreds of companies out there employing who want your time but give nothing back.
I know next thing you'll ask for is a coding test and I’m not doing it. You can blame all the previous companies who wanted a coding test and it turned out to be just burning my time.
No cover letters, no coding tests, no 5 stage interview processes, no “you passed 4 interviews and failed the 5th cause everyone has veto”.