31–40 of 130 posts
As a person hiring, I would ignore them. I only care does the candidate have the minimum skill set to be worth taking time to phone screen. I'll find out everything else I think is relevant then.
Always write a cover letter from scratch. It's better to invest time in five most relevant positions and apply with a complementing cover letter (and resume), than to apply for fifty positions without any background research (AKA generic cover letter/resume.) If you are applying online to a big tech company, it almost always goes into an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). The ATS scans your resume and cover letter for…
+1 on the ATS. They are a waste of your time, generally. If you see an interesting position, try to find an "in" to the company via your network, 1st or 2nd order. See if you can reach the hiring manager directly. HR/ATS get in the way of that. They are supposed to be a service, but as often as not, they are a bottleneck of dubious value. Think of this as engineering your way around the bottlenecks.
+1 on writing a personalized cover letter for each application (e.g. resume submission). I spent quite a bit of time reading/listening to what people thought were good cover letters. What it comes down to is, be real, be yourself. Explain what excites you and how this position does this.
After I did all of this, I found myself a) applying to fewer positions (this was early this year), and b) getting a far higher response rate (60+%). This culminated in multiple interesting offers.
YMMV, but good cover letters help you stand out. Show you are a human being that they want on their team.
Last time I applied to jobs, and got calls from recruiters, I asked what stood out. It was always the resume. I asked if the cover letter helped. Response was usually "You submitted a cover letter? Let me check. Oh hey, I see you submitted one." My advice is the opposite of another comment: Write one only if you have a "direct pass" that avoids the HR/recruiter filter. Recruiters don't seem to look at them, and HR fo…
It seems very useful in some fields which require the skills a cover letter shows off and could substitute for a screen or casual interview.
In many technical fields however, requesting cover letters usually suggests to me a lower quality in their hiring process. This undoubtedly bleeds over to my perception of the management, namely more into checking boxes than results.
Cover letters might get lost in the HR departments of larger companies, but they're incredibly useful to me when sorting through applications at a small company. Especially for entry level positions, a well-written cover letter is a much stronger positive signal than a bullet point style resume. Far too often the resume is a regurgitation of university class projects and career center templates. Think of it like a pr…
That is interesting. We are seeking the best way to do something, but we are forgetting that people, the interviewers are all different, looking for arbitrarily (but defendable) different things..
Far as new grads. When I got my first job, I did list my class projects, but I focused more on the internships I had had (3 by that point), as well as my freelancing, and the work with open source 3d printers. If a new grad only has projects that would be a red flag.
Personally I have never really seen the point in writing one. My resume has all my abilities and even a bit about me. The recruiter is going to scan the resume and let the computer decide if I get the interview. That said the smarter thing you can do is copy the job posting, attach it to the end of your resume. I usually do it in micro print and white, as it's just for the machines. Speaking as someone that has inter…
> Dear Sir/Madam,
> My name is scabarott and I am a Something Engineer with N years of experience. As shown in my CV I my strenghs are [something impressive, don't be boring]. I think this will make me a good fit with your team and am looking forward to your reply.
> Yours Faithfully, > scabarott
Once I saw a tech company trying to be hip by saying don't send a cover letter, but then later asking for a short description of what makes you great. I thought it was silly, because that description just was the cover letter. But it was also wise because it set expectations well, and prevented people bloating out their letters.
P.S: The informal e-mail you my attach a CV to and the dead-tree cover letter are really the same thing, just tweaked sighlty for different technologies and traditions.