The Art of the Cover Letter

Ahh…the cover letter. Loathed by job-seekers. Sometimes read by hiring managers. Almost always secondary to a meticulously crafted resume. Long story short: writing cover letters kind of suck, but they can often be your gateway to the job of your dreams, and knowing how to craft a good one is something that any job-seeker should learn how to do.I first learned about cover letters back in college – like many of us did – when I started to think about summer internships between sophomore and junior year. Applications would say “please attach your resume and cover letter” and that was about it. So, to the internet I went to figure out what a “good cover letter” looks like. Most posts would include a laundry list of anywhere from 5 to 30 different things to consider when writing a cover letter. “Showcase your skills”, “don’t repeat everything you have on your resume”, “tell a story”, “say why you want the job”, and a bunch of other generalized things that didn’t really give you much guidance.As a 20-year-old who had zero experience in the professional world I thought these things needed to be followed to a T, so I went ahead and tried crafting cover letters and personal statements that I thought adhered to all of these bullet-points I had read about. What resulted was something that I was proud of, but were absolutely terrible when I went back to read them in the years following. I tried too hard to adhere to those “rules” that I read about, which resulted in a jumbled-mess of thought that didn’t converge on any central idea or call-to-action.Unsurprisingly, I didn’t have much luck with the internship and summer research fellowship applications that I was cranking out like it was nobody’s business. Most of them were impersonal to the companies or research institutions that I was applying to and, once I came up with a script that I thought sounded nice, just repurposed it for everyone (i.e. replacing company X with company Y). There was even one time where a hiring manager went out of her way to email me back to say:[su_quote]“  Hey. Thanks for applying, but you left “Company X” in your cover letter and you’re applying for “Company Y”. I know that you’re probably young and don’t have much experience with job applications, but be careful to not make this same mistake when submitting applications to other companies in the future.” [/su_quote]I was taken aback (and really shouldn't have been), but realized that I wasn’t being logical (or careful) in my applications, which is when I started to re-think my strategy.The opportunity for a fancy internship at a big corporation passed for the summer of 2013, but when it came time to start crafting cover letters for summer 2014 internships, I knew I needed to change what I was doing – and I did. At that point, I was starting to target my search towards consulting & finance companies (Deloitte, Accenture, Morgan Stanley, etc.), which ended up turning out really well. I ended up securing a bunch of on campus interviews, and here’s what I did:

• Came up with general idea for why I wanted the jobs I was applying for, and wrote those down.
• Poured over each job description dozens of times and spent hours researching each company to ensure I had the best 30,000-foot view of what I was potentially getting into.
• Most importantly: built out a custom story for each of the companies I was applying to, which often took several hours and several revisions (per job) to look and sound perfect. I basically treated “applying to jobs” as another class on my schedule and approached it with the same dedication that I did for my other classes.

The resulting cover letters were targeted, concise, and painted a pretty good picture for hiring managers into why I wanted to join their organizations. I obviously didn’t have a 100%, or even 50% success rate in the applications I was putting out at the time, and having the awesome opportunity to network with these companies face-to-face (before actually applying) definitely helped in getting my name recognized, but I was told by recruiters over and over again that my cover letters were what brought my applications over the line.This strategy, more recently, was also paramount to my success in getting initial interviews at some of the most successful and well-funded technology startups here in NYC; where the expectations are big and the pool of talent is even bigger. As someone who doesn’t have a large network of people in NYC tech, I didn’t have the luxury of being able to walk into a room (like a college career fair) and network with whoever I wanted to which meant it was even more important for me to be able to paint a picture of who I was, why I was excited about the opportunity, and why I’d be the best choice for the job – all within ~300-350 words + a resume.So, what to take away here?Basically: there isn’t a magical “formula” to writing a good cover letter. The onus is on you to be able to:

• Articulate the overarching reason why you’re excited to work at Company X (their mission, technology they are developing, people they work with, etc.)
• Discuss how your unique set of skills fits with their organization & job requirements
• Elaborate (not regurgitate) upon your resume and how it fits into your overall story.

How you get to this point is completely up to you! Iterate upon it, gain input from others, read it out-loud until it sounds bad-ass, and click that submit button (after proof-reading, of course).I love helping others navigate the job application process and giving general career advice, so don’t hesitate to reach out here or via LinkedIn if you’d like to bounce ideas off of me! I hope to hear from you soon.-Nick