A cover letter is a substantial part of the job seeking process—maybe the MOST substantial. Yes, resumes are important because they spend time building up the mystique of you by detailing your personal qualifications and achievements, but the cover letter is your chance to actually be you. You get to be personal, creative, if not totally informal than at least more casual. You get to color yourself in.
It’s easy to see how a cover letter can make or break your candidacy for a potential job or internship or what have you. Write an engaging, intriguing, knockout cover letter and you might as well set your weekly suit-and-tie rotation. Write a bad one, and you can forget you ever applied for a position In the first place.
The articles for this week offered some very helpful tips on how to craft a successful cover letter, and the two examples were very good samples. Both were intimate without being too self-centered, and well-written without being overkill.
I think the most important point from the tips—and this speaks directly to why the two samples were so strong—is that you should never under any circumstances recycle your cover letters. The same can be said, at least to an extent, for resumes, but it’s especially critical here because it takes away the best part of a cover letter, and that’s the idea behind it that I mentioned earlier. You’re taking a page to show a little bit of your true self and connect with the company you’re going out for; that personal touch is what makes it hit.
I try to put a little bit of my true character in everything I write, to a fault even. When I should be focusing strictly on factual details and crafting a formal, strict essay, I still slip in a ‘Rob-ism’. Cover letters are just that to me, one long, extensive, applicable, pertinent, ‘-ism’.
It’s easy to see how a cover letter can make or break your candidacy for a potential job or internship or what have you. Write an engaging, intriguing, knockout cover letter and you might as well set your weekly suit-and-tie rotation. Write a bad one, and you can forget you ever applied for a position In the first place.
The articles for this week offered some very helpful tips on how to craft a successful cover letter, and the two examples were very good samples. Both were intimate without being too self-centered, and well-written without being overkill.
I think the most important point from the tips—and this speaks directly to why the two samples were so strong—is that you should never under any circumstances recycle your cover letters. The same can be said, at least to an extent, for resumes, but it’s especially critical here because it takes away the best part of a cover letter, and that’s the idea behind it that I mentioned earlier. You’re taking a page to show a little bit of your true self and connect with the company you’re going out for; that personal touch is what makes it hit.
I try to put a little bit of my true character in everything I write, to a fault even. When I should be focusing strictly on factual details and crafting a formal, strict essay, I still slip in a ‘Rob-ism’. Cover letters are just that to me, one long, extensive, applicable, pertinent, ‘-ism’.