Cover letter tips

What’s the best way to write a cover letter?

You can read books on formatting. You can read articles giving inane advice like “use the active voice.” Or you can simply go with what works.

For my money’s worth, I like to follow a winner. That is why I was happy to learn of a book basically consisting of successful cover letters.

The book offers limited advice, as it mostly defers to writing samples. These samples provide all that is necessary to create a good cover letter. Here are a few tips my friend Greg gleaned when he recommended the book to me:

Hey Presh, I would strongly recommend you take a peek at 175 High-Impact Cover Letters. The book gives 175 examples of Cover Letters for Senior Executives trying to find a job. They are extremely polished, and the general formatting (each letter has a certain flow) is very effective. In particular, here are some tips I learned:

All letters begin with the same header as you have on your resume
Each letter is dated
Each letter starts with the business address of the company you are targeting (shows you did some research)
No smart paragraph exceeds three or four lines
Most smart cover letters contain four to five one-line bulletin points that discuss the results of your previous work
Each letter ends with smartly phrased sales pitch, imploring action on the reader.
Each letter is “pseudo-signed” using a different font (how nice!).

I grant you that each one of these things may seem small – but when you put them together, I think you will see a marked improvement in your overall cover letter.

After reading Greg’s email and a few samples from the book, I realized my own cover letter was inadequate. I spent a few days revising and I am much happier with my cover letter template now.

I hope the book can help you too. Here’s a link if you are interested in getting it:

175 High-Impact Cover Letters at Amazon

*P.S.–how to get free shipping

You might notice that Amazon currently lists “175 High-Impact Cover Letters” at $24.95 for new copies, just a tad under free shipping minimum.

One way to get around this restriction is to add an inexpensive (filler) item to your order. There’s a nice list of these items at Slickdeals:

http://slickdeals.net/slickfillers/

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2 Responses to “Cover letter tips”
Hi Presh,

Great to see you writing again.

Thanks for the cover letter book rec. My question is, how do you send your cover letter and resume in an email? Do you attach both and just write, please see attached? I have been using the email as a cover letter and attaching resumes. Do you ever use snail mail?

Thanks,

Stephen

By Stephen on Aug 31, 2009
Stephen: Good question. I think it depends on the purpose of the cover letter. If the cover letter is in response to a formal job listing, I think it is fine to email both the cover letter and the resume as attachments. This allows proper formatting.

If your job search is broader, and about positions not formally listed, then it is important to write a more targeted “broadcast” letter directly to a functional manager who would be aware of positions HR may not know about. But again, I would attach the cover letter and resume (probably as pdf files) to get good formatting. The book mentions this approach requires a larger search base of maybe 15 companies since there is about a 3 to 5 percent response rate. Snail mail probably has a lower response rate.

By Presh Talwalkar on Sep 6, 2009