Who Reads Cover Letters, Anyway?

You might just be surprised at the answer to that question because for many potential employers, the cover letter is the best first place for you to make a good impression. It is your opportunity to get your foot in the door for an interview.

Your cover letter represents you and completes the picture you have drawn of yourself in your resume, filling in any blanks and giving personality to names and dates. While it may seem time-efficient to leave out the cover letter when sending out your resume, thinking the facts speak for themselves, it is a big mistake to do so.

Your cover letter has a lot of work to do in a relatively short space. It has to be personable, precise and it has to sell you to the person who is reading the letter and will be deciding whether to pass your resume on to the person who makes the hiring decisions. Your cover letter must be error free, so check it, check it again and have someone else check it. Spell check will not catch an error if you spell the wrong word correctly, so don't just run it through a spell checker or grammar check and assume it is done. There can be no errors in your cover letter.

If there are any holes in your employment history, your cover letter is where you fill them. Honestly and without superfluous embellishment, preferably. The person reading and evaluating your cover letter and your resume has read a lot of them. And has probably written one, too. She knows the tricks, the buzzwords and the weasel words that people use to pad their resumes. Don't fall into that trap of thinking you can fool your reader.

Your cover letter should show respect to the person who will be reading it. It is nice to be able to address it to the proper person, but if you can't get a name you can verify with a phone call, use a non-sexist, generic salutation. There are few things more irritating than having to read a letter, even a cover letter, addressed to someone else or to the wrong gender. It should avoid insulting his or her intelligence, too.

In order to achieve it's one true goal, this letter has to be read. And no one in a position to hire you will read a letter that isn't well written. The goal that your cover letter needs to do is get you in the door for an interview. A cover letter is a sales letter and the product it is selling is you.