More on how to write a cover letter

Judi Perkins, author of How to Find Your Perfect Job writes in with some cover letter writing tips.

Here are three tips, although the way I teach my clients to write cover letters (I have a course in it) involves much, much more than this.

DON’T WRITE A GENERIC COVER LETTER. Yes, they’re easier but they win no points and accomplish no forward movement. You’re hoping that telling them all these great things about you will catch their attention, but the ad is the company telling you exactly what they want. Writing a generic cover letter is similar to you telling a Best Buy salesperson you want a digital camera that takes great outdoor pictures, and then he starts telling you all about the camera’s long battery life. Yes, it’s a great feature of the camera, but it’s not what you want. So do you care? Not much.

Pick two important aspects of the ad’s job requirements and give an example of each from your career. Lead with their words, not your synonyms. Most people just say they have experience, which is too subjective. Or they do it laundry list style, which is also too subjective. You need a specific example or two and you need it with results. This is objective and carries much more credibility.

Keep your paragraphs to 6 lines max. More than that is too much text for the eye to follow and rather than read or skimmed, your words are skipped.

The debate these days about cover letters being important is coming up not because cover letters are a mere formality or unimportant, but because they’re all so worthless and uninteresting. They all say the same thing (which is to say “nothing”) with the same phrases. With all the resume submittals these days, what’s the point in reading them? There isn’t one. An effective cover letter whets the appetite for the resume by speaking specifically about your experience and directly in relation to the ad. Most people think they do this, but the operative word is think, because cover letters are so odious to write, that eventually people become enamored of their finely crafted sentences and stray from each new ad.

If this is Roxanne - hi! I'd love to help you out again! And if it's not Roxanne, I'd love to help you out anyway! Either way, please let me know what else I can provide or if you need clarification on anything.

Judi Perkins
The How-To Job Coach
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