As the job market gets more crowded (including with fake candidates apparently), it’s harder to stand out as a candidate. One thing that works for many folks in my audience is applying to jobs that require cover letters or include knock-out questions (the short answer questions that are part of the initial application). I recently conducted a quick survey on LinkedIn where ~40% of respondents say they’ve gotten more interviews from jobs that ask for cover letters or include knock-out questions in the application.
This makes a lot of sense to me because a lot of us are better at sharing specific examples of our skills than corraling them into a short bullet point.
I’ve previously shared advice about how to pitch your skills in short narrative form – in the professional summary section of the resume and in those short answer questions many applications include.
In today’s newsletter, I want to focus on cover letters, thinking not just about how to write an effective one but also how to save time writing them.
I’m a big fan of creating standardized documents and creating standardized processes that allow you to efficiently tailor these documents when you need to share something more personalized for a specific job.
Some of the advice I’ll talk about here will share a lot of commonalities with the articles I linked to above. Each of these pitches asks you to share your career narrative and work philosophy; the main aspect that changes is length of your answer and the format. So today I’ll talk about how to identify your most highly-aligned skills and experience but I’ll also talk about how to assess a job description so you’re identifying the key skills they want rather than just the ones that companies in general typically want.
When you write a cover letter, you have more space to make your case but the larger blank page can often lead to more paralysis. So today I’m going to talk about strategies to fill that blank page with targeted messaging that’s easy to tailor for distinct audiences and will help your application materials get moved to the next stage.
That said, you’re probably wondering if you really need to know how to write a cover letter anymore. After all, you’re probably writing a lot fewer of them as fewer companies require them in this age of AI.
In the past, about 20% of the jobs I posted explicitly requested a cover letter. Now, only about 10% do.
But the cover letter is not dead! I looked at the roles currently open on the job board and found that some job categories are more likely to request cover letters: customer success, executive roles, operations, and project management.
Each of these roles requested cover letters about 20% of the time.
Having a strong cover letter template is still a necessity in today’s job market so let’s talk about how to do that without adding yet another big task to your plate.
Table of Contents:
- When You Need a Cover Letter & When You Can Skip One
- Creating a Strong Cover Letter Template
- Connecting with their Mission
- Establishing Your Career Thruline
- Sharing Why They Should Interview You
- Conclusion: Tailoring Your Resume Efficiently
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