Cover Letters: What’s the Point?
I just currently finished writing out a cover letter for position that I'm applying for in the summer on my University. And I'm probably going to be writing a couple more cover letters for different positions that I've been like on LinkedIn and Handshake and other job opportunity websites just to expand my range for different opportunities this summer, just because I still don't know exactly what I want to do
Oh, my gosh. Thank you. I have the same exact thoughts. Like, if you have, like, a skills section or like, a description section, your resume. Isn't that enough? Like, why do you need a whole cover letter? Cover letters are so frustrating to me because they each have to be individualized, and it's like I'm already in school writing tons of essays. So having to write cover letters just feels like another essay I have to write
So I remember when I was a teacher, we had students coming in from all over the world, El Salvador, Mexico, Armenia, the Ukraine. And when they came in, they were required to take these tests to sort of determine where they get placed at the school. And I remember the vast majority of these kids would place in very low performing classes. Similarly, when they would have to take the state exams, they would perform very low
Taylor. Firstly, thank you for responding. I really appreciate your perspective, especially because it's easy to hear from other College students and not get outside perspective, but especially because we were the major person with the hiring process as well, specifically with me. And I'm sure so many other student interns here as well
Barbara KB
@barbarakb · 4:23
There's just many ways that things get filtered out. And I would agree. I remember there was a period of about six, eight years there where there were no resumes. It was all supposed to be just in the cover letter. And your resume was supposed to be this incredibly sparse thing. So there's always been kind of a come and go in all of this in my experience of 40 years of doing this
And I didn't even know, for example, that there's and resumes weren't even a thing and cover letters were the main priority. But thank you for putting in your two cent. And it definitely helped me understand the importance of cover letters even more
Thank you for posting this because even though sometimes I find cover letters for certain applications kind of annoying, I was actually hypothesizing that it is a good way to kind of yield someone out on a more human level because you can definitely get an interesting idea of somebody by the cadence with which they write, by their word choices and their flow. And so I was kind of hypothesizing that it's also a good way to tell if someone's got a written communication
Tim Ereneta
@Tim · 3:21
They could pinpoint the theme so that I didn't have to guess why or how their career tied together these four different organizations, all these different appointments they've had over their careers. On the flip side, I had several applicants who wrote me cover letters but did not address the elephant in the room that their industry and all their communications experience were for an industry that was totally inappropriate for my company. My company does a lot of work with families and their kids, ages two to twelve