Clojurians Log v2

I had a recent experience with this as a hiring manager and I can say that the cover letter (or in our case, the answer to the question “What interests you about working for this company?“—which was presented during the application process—was the most important factor to determine which candidates we talked to. Especially as a small company, it’s not feasible to go through hundreds, maybe thousands of applications and carefully evaluate pages-long CVs. The cover letter being authentic and tailored to that specific job opening/company was the best way to gauge the interest of the candidate and how their background and skills could match our needs. We received hundreds of applications • without an answer to that question • with a generic answer that didn’t address the job description at all • with text that was clearly AI-generated ◦ which is not hard to tell after you notice the patterns: paraphrasing the exact words of the job description, using lots of words to convey essentially nothing relevant. I’m sure there were a lot of potentially good candidates that we dismissed using this criteria of requiring a good cover letter, but the signal-to-noise ratio proved to be quite good. Now, even if it’s just a couple of paragraphs—which are totally enough when well written—it takes time and effort to do it—it’s tailored for each case, after all. I don’t know how a candidate would do do that if they’re applying to dozens of jobs on daily basis.

...Of course, in better times you can just DM/email the right person and let things flow, but in a good chunk of cases you have no other choice than to 'cold-call' through a standardized format.

As a hiring manager with a strong preference for a cover letter tailored to the specific job you're applying for, I heartily endorse this message!

It’s hard for me to understand the distinction you’re trying to draw without an example of the “tired ‘cover letter’ prose format” - but that may be because I already try to include things like what you’re describing in every cover letter I write

When I think of a typical cover letter, it comes to mind exactly what Google Images suggests:

...namely a literal letter, where the 'letter' format both constrains the kind of message you'd put in, and makes the informational architecture weaker. (For example, bullet points are informationally stronger, and quicker to parse)

I think telling people to rely upon bullet points is bad writing advice

a résumé consists of lots of bullet points, so to complement that, a cover letter can let you actually incorporate somewhat longer form ideas and showcase your ability to write prose effiectively

https://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html from a formatting perspective, it sounds like the advice you’re giving is analogous to the typesetting changes recommended in Practical Typography chapter on résumés

I think "prose" is fine if it's personalized for the job and the applicant and doesn't just sound like boilerplate -- but a lot of "tired 'cover letter' prose" is very generic and really tells me nothing about why the applicant wants this job or why the company should hire this person. Adding technical strengths and soft skills that don't fit the resume/CV format to the cover letter is good advice, to help keep the resume/CV focused on the skills for this job while allowing HR and the hiring manager to see more depth without distracting from the "meat" of the application.

@afoltzm Nice link! For clarity, I don't pursue any kind of universal truth - just throwing advice which people may mix and match freely. If there's any valuable takeaway from me it could be: a 'cover letter' field is just a slot for a .pdf, you can think outside the box to stand out.

You certainly want the "cover letter" to come across as "human" and not "AI" 🙂

I've had some very unusual cover "letters" over the decades -- def. an opportunity for some candidates to "stand out" (although not always in a good way! 🙂 )