I’ve been actively involved in the hiring process at work for over two years now. Résumé screens, phone interviews, coding phone interviews, lunch interviews, and technical in-person interviews, I get to do it all. Sometimes it’s a minor annoyance that keeps me from coding, other times it’s a nice break in the middle of a busy day.
But recently I’ve become more and more frustrated with one section of the process, the résumé screens. The problem has to do with cover letters, or the lack thereof.
In our system, a résumé screen has seven different criteria, five of which must be met for the applicant to move on to the next stage. (Four is sometimes accepted, but only for obviously exceptional candidates who might not fit within the strict interpretation of the system.) Generally, a résumé can only satisfy three of those seven criteria. Sometimes we can stretch it and infer one or two more, but it’s rare. So when an applicant doesn’t send along a cover letter, I’ve got to work harder just to give them a fighting chance; it doesn’t endear them to me.
On the other hand, a good cover letter can show me that the applicant meets four of the five required criteria. Not only do they increase their odds in raw numbers, they also make my job easier, which can only help them.
But not just any cover letter will do. It doesn’t seem like it would be that obvious, but I can usually identify a “Dear [Company Name],” cover letter within a few seconds of opening it. It’s better than no cover letter at all, but it almost automatically loses on two of the four criteria, meaning that the applicant has to nail the five remaining. They make my job harder, and the raw odds of them getting in are lowered.
So what makes a good cover letter? There are a lot of resources out there, but for me it comes down to two simple things: tell me why you want to work at my company and tell me why you want to do the job you are applying for. Bonus points for showing me those two things. That’s the generic advice. Specifically for programmers, show me your previous work, your outside projects, the blog you wrote from scratch, etc.
Take the time. You can still share a lot of the cover letter between companies. But make sure the company knows you care by writing a paragraph about what draws you to the company. Be specific, words like “interesting” and “exciting” don’t add anything.
And try to make my job easier.
From this I take that some of your criteria are:- cover letter must say “why” applicant wants to work at the company. You do know that they probably don’t, they just want the job, right? If ass-licking/lying is one of your criteria…- cover letter must say why you want the job you are applying for. Seriously?Maybe your article would be more useful if you outlined your criteria.You failed my criteria.
Charlie++ I hate the whole cover letter thing. half the time I don’t even know what company I’m applying to (job boards). Even less do I care… Chances are you don’t work for the top 5 in your companies field (maybe you do?) so what the heck makes hr and companies think that their company is so special. To me unless you’ve made my top 5 (which I don’t even qualify for working for) you aren’t special and I don’t care. It’s a retarded dance. I admit I suck at this dance, but it’s retarded.P.S. My sky is grey not blue, you fail my test of being an intelligent human.
Generally, a rez can only satisfy three of those seven criteria. Sometimes we can stretch it and infer one or two more, but it’s rare. So when an applicant doesn’t send along a **COVER LETTER**, I’ve got to work harder, just to give them a fighting chance; it doesn’t endear them to me.
What kind of jackass doesn’t write a custom cover letter when applying for a job!? Are these Java programmers or something? That’s just totally unacceptable… no cover letter == resume goes in the trash.
well resume now a day plays a vital role in job hunting especially if you are trying to apply online. you must be creative in making it but not that much.
you must be really cool to rag on java programmers ‘dude’
The overwhelming majority of people applying for a Junior Developer position didn’t bother with any cover letter beyond perhaps an informal one-sentence message in the email.Oddly, a few people even wrote very informal “introductions” in the body of their email and then *attached* a form coverletter.doc.
You’re an idiot. Are you really going to pass on someone with the right experience because they didn’t write you a letter? It sounds like you just want someone to kiss your ass.
I don’t do cover letters personally. If my cv or my recommendation isn’t enough to catch you, nevermind. Put yourself in the job hunters shoes, your job is one of the 50 they’ve applied for, do they really do a custom cover letter for each one? Especially when most of the jobs posted are to recuitment agents, rather then to the employer.A lot of job postings don’t deserve a good cover letter i.e. silly requirements or just no real details. p.s. “the of color of the sky is:”? – black at night in the country, grey at night in the city, you get red sky, white / light grey when it’s cloudly, sorry
Of course a cover letter is not needed. That’s just you guys imposing some arbitrary requirement. Silly. Doesn’t make sense. When you are recruiting people, you need to analyse every criteria and say “why are we setting this as a requirement?” “what do we gain from this requirement?”. As the previous commenter points out, it sounds like you want a cover letter because you want to be respected. But you have to understand that there is no existing relationship between you and the job seeker. Job seekers may have to apply for many tens or even hundreds of roles. It’s silly to expect that a job seekr would sit down and craft a loving and attentive cover letter assuring you that they think your company rocks and they want nothing more than to work there.If you are rejecting people that do not have cover letters then your company deserves to be missing out on great people – and it surely is.This guy is an awesome developer – works hard, knows his stuff, is easy to get along with, great ideas and solutions – OH BUT NO, we don’t want him because he didn’t write us a grovelling cover letter.Your desire for cover letters reveals that you don;t know how to find and employ great people.
I’m surprised at the negativity that this post has stirred up. I wrote this as a suggestion, from the point of view of someone who reviews resumes and screens candidates on a regular basis. Nearly every career counselor will echo this suggestion; you will vastly increase your chances of getting hired by writing a custom cover letter that tells the company why they should hire you. But it’s up to you, feel free to use the shotgun in your job hunt, I hope it gets you where you want to go.Those of you that think cover letters are stupid, unnecessary requirements, or somehow think that I like them because they suck up or kiss ass are the group that should really pay attention to this. The whole “oh no, it’s inconvenient for me to write a one-page letter to each company I apply to” shows exactly the kind of laziness that we’re trying to avoid.Will that cause us to screen out some fantastic developers because they didn’t jump through the hoops? Sure. But that’s better than wasting developers’ time interviewing candidates that never have a shot, or worse, hiring someone who’s not good enough. We’d much rather pass over a few good developers than hire a few bad ones.To answer your question, a cover letter is not a requirement. I made that clear above. That’s what the five of seven criteria are for. But not having a cover letter makes it very difficult to evaluate someone thoroughly, which makes it hard for me as the reviewer to say “yes, let’s spend money to interview this person”. If you want to know more about the criteria, and why we use them, read Joel’s post on sorting resumes (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/….
I agree with Steve… During my last job search I received 4 offers and never sent a cover letter. If you can’t view over my resume and know I’m worth it within a few minutes then don’t bother calling me. And by the way you might benefit from reading the following: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co… [Quote]Your cover letter? DELETE. Nobody cares![/Quote]
Hang on, you can’t now argue that a cover letter is not in fact a requirement for a job at your company – you’ve made that clear by writing a blog post on it, if it wasn’t a requirement then you wouldn’t have bothered. You’ve also made clear how important it is in your assessment process.Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that this sort of recruitment process is one in which the employer feels that they need some way of reducing the amount of work they need to do, so they impose meaningless and arbitrary criteria really mainly to cut down their workload and number of applicants.This approach is fine for companies that have huge numbers of talented people applying – usually because they have an unusually strong market profile, like google or fog creek. Basically there’s so many applicants that you can afford to “waste” half of them on meaningless eliminitation criteria and you’ll still have a done of awesome people. For companies like that, this approach works. Such companies are in a position to say “unless you tell us we rock, and are willing to jump through the hoops of our extended recruitment process then you are obviously not keen enough for a job here”.But for normal, ordinary companies not flooded with the top technical talent, it is not practical to impose meaningless criteria designed to stroke the corporate ego. Normal companies have to assess resumes and try to find smart people, compete against other companies for great talent and work hard to identify smart people.If writing a cover letter was the foundation of being a great software engineer then surely universities would include a “writing a cover letter” subject in their courses.So in conclusion, the cover letter elimination criteria works for your company probably because you are inundated with smart applicants and you can afford to reduce your workload by dropping people based on meaningless assessment criteria.At Google, you have to be a student who is good at “everything” to get a job http://steveblank.com/2009/04/…Hmmm. “did not get top marks in every subject?” – clearly not a smart person!And Google can afford to have such silly recruitment criteria because it is flooded with people applying to work there. Even if they were to cut out half of all applicants because “people with black hair aren’t smart enough” then they would still have more than enough smart people applying. But that still does not mean that such criteria would be a valid reason to exclude someone from the recruitment process.So my conclusion is that you can afford to knock people out of contention because you can simply have so many applicants that meaningless criteria won’t prevent you from finding great people amongst those who are left.
I like this post, but I’m very curious about the details of your resume/cover-letter filtering:What are your seven criteria? And for which two is the cover letter necessary?
@OP: I have been doing hiring for a while now for junior and senior level developer positions. Cover letters are a waste of the candidate’s time as well as my time.
Joel’s article is not saying that a “cover letter” is needed. What Joel is saying is that he wants to see someone’s passion, and that he wants to hear them say out loud that they really want to work at Fog Creek. This is perfectly reasonable because Fog Creek is a company with very high profile – there’s no reason not to demand evidence from people that they really want to work there.This does NOT generalise to the idea that “a cover letter should be sent with every job application to every employer”.In Joel’s article the cover letter is simply the medium through which passion for the craft of programming and desire to work at Fog Creek is expressed. It wouldn’t matter if those messages were communicated in a cover letter or at the top of the resume as an introduction, or in any other way.A “cover letter” is not needed. Communication of passion should be included in all resumes. Very high profile companies such as Fog Creek may expect applicants to express their enthusiasm for the company – ordinary companies (i.e. most companies) should not expect the luxury of having job seekers express their deepest desire to work there with a custom written corporate love letter.
What sort of a brown-nosing jackass actually bothers with a cover letter? If I wanted every applicant to beg me for the job I’ll get them to do it during the interview. Cover letters are a meaningless bit of fluff meant to endear the applicant to the HR drone doing the screening. Rational, logical people who want the best qualified candidate wont even bother reading a cover letter.
Obviously there’s a disconnect here between those who assume their resume submission gets machine sorted and scanned for keywords by an HR drone versus going directly to the hiring manager who opens each email lovingly only to sigh as another copy and pasted form letter accompanies each resume. Seriously, the concept of a cover letter is somewhat of an anachronism in an age where job searching is all done online. That’s why many job postings specifically ask for a cover letter that addresses the “why do you want to work here/ why are you worthy?” questions. It’s no longer the default and the fault is yours for not asking for it up front.
As a contractor, I’ve never sent a cover letter with my resume. I’m not selling passion, I’m selling expertise.
No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
Wow, I’m also surprised at the reaction to this post (disclosure: I used to work at Fog Creek, am now at Google). For those saying that the applicant has to apply for tens or hundreds of roles and can’t be bothered with a cover letter for each one, that is a danger sign to me. Maybe I’m elitist, but I want applicants to find jobs they’re interested in, apply to the ones they want, and expect to get those jobs. My experience may be abnormal, but I’ve worked at four companies now where I got the job cold without knowing anybody, and until this last round (where I wanted to move back to California and applied to five companies), I applied to no more than one other company. Admittedly, I had the advantage that I already had a job each time, so I could afford to be picky. Companies like Fog Creek and Google want rock stars – people who are choosing where they want to work next, not joining whatever company is willing to accept them. It’s a mutual selection process – the applicant can examine all of the public information about a company (which is abundant for companies like Fog Creek and Google and can be checked by talking to people at those companies) before applying. Having the applicant submit a cover letter is just giving the company similar information. If an applicant provides a website on their resume with their public coding exploits, that can be as good as a cover letter in providing that information. I would restate Tyler’s post into the form of: give the company some information that will distinguish you – it can be a cover letter, a website, your leadership of an open source project, your TopCoder ranking, etc.
I too was surprised by the response to this post. While I sympathize with the job-seekers — it is a pain in the ass to write a lot of tailored letters — I also think that it is fair enough for an employer to expect them.The thing about it is, if you are the kind of worker who can’t be bothered with writing a letter, then you likely are not going to fit in well at a company that values that kind of thing. Conversely, if you like the opportunity to write a letter (or demonstrate your skills in a non-resume form) then you likely are not going to like working at a company that chucks your letter immediately and deems your resume inadequate.Culture is a big part of any company (even if the culture is that there isn’t a company culture, that is significant). And a meshing of culture and values is vital to any successful employment arrangement. To me, the value of a cover letter in the hiring process is part of a company’s culture. If you think it’s stupid then you shouldn’t work at a place that values that kind of thing.Of course that means that there are times when a developer who’s raw skills and talent fit a job description gets passed by, but that’s probably okay. If that person doesn’t value the same things that your company values, s/he probably wouldn’t be happy there anyway.
I generally don’t write cover letters. However, this is not because I am uninterested it is because the job description does not tell me anywhere near enough to know if I want it. Frankly, I would prefer to write a post interview letter. Part of the problem are HR departments and head hunters that cover the req with buzzwords, but tell you nothing unique about the project, company, environment, etc. I have been on both sides and I don’t look for something specific to the job unless I have given them that information in the req. Expecting anything else is fool hardy.
The importance of a targeted cover letter is often not high on the list. Remember, first impressions are critical. In many cases it’s your first impression to your prospective employer. A cover letter is as important a the resume itself.
You are spot on about the importance of a good cover letter. Very good advice: “So what makes a good cover letter? There are a lot of resources out there, but for me it comes down to two simple things: tell me why you want to work at my company and tell me why you want to do the job you are applying for. Bonus points for showing me those two things.”
” At 5:21 PM on July 3, 2009, Les Stroud said,I generally don’t write cover letters.”Dude, you don’t need to write a cover letter – you’re Survivorman.
From the perspective of a student coming out of college, I get the impression that a cover letter is a waste of the employer’s time. I go to the college hiring fairs and see piles of resumes that someone is going to have to sift through. It would seem to my advantage not to be a burden to that person, but let my accomplishments speak for themselves then have them do a phone screen if they want more personal information.Your company obviously has them as a requirement, but companies don’t generally specify whether they would like a cover letter or if they would be insulted to have to waste more time with it.
Wow, I cannot even believe what I am reading in these comments. A cover letter is as important or even *more* important than the resume. The absence of cover letter indicates that a candidate is NOT INTERESTED in working for my company. We will not consider a candidate who has not included a cover letter that is personalized and explains why they want to work for us and how they can help us be successful. This seems so blatantly obvious that I’m surprised someone had to write a post about it. After reading the comments, I understand why.Also, if you’re sending out 10s or 100s of resumes, you’re doing something wrong. Pick 5 or 10 companies where you think you’d be a good fit and be very persistent.
“If I wanted every applicant to beg me for the job I’ll get them to do it during the interview. Cover letters are a meaningless bit of fluff meant to endear the applicant to the HR drone doing the screening. Rational, logical people who want the best qualified candidate wont even bother reading a cover letter.”Seriously!!! You’d rather line up and call a bunch of applicants, have them all come downtown, validate their parking and sit in a stuffy room with each of them for an hour just to find out they’re not qualified when most likely spending 5 minutes reading a cover letter could tell you the same thing? I tell you what, that’s efficiency at its finest. I agree with pwb. If you’re blasting a resume to 100 companies looking for the first code monkey position that opens up, you’re either doing it wrong or you just don’t care or both – in either case I don’t feel you have earned the privilege of an interview.
@steve spot on.Except for spec job enquiries for which the number necessary is too huge to bother with custom cover letters, there is generally little point in cover letters as most jobs go through agents who simply don’t pass them on. I have been on both ends of the recruitment process and when looking at dozens f CV’s not once did I see a cover letter.Personally I think a cover letter should simply state your purpose, your requirements and finish with a call to action.
I just read the linked article”Pickiness. We look closely at the cover letter for evidence that the applicant really wants to work for us”What utter rubbish. The applicant cannot tell if he/she wants to work for you at that stage no matter how much they have read your marketing and recruitment material. I never make such a decision until I visit the place and talk to the people. Anything said in the cover letter will be a shallow BS façade
I find this post and the reactions to it very interesting. When I first started job hunting I wrote a long and detailed cover letter for each job I applied for, tailoring it specifically to that job advert. After very little success a friend (who is head of a design agency) reccomended I ditch the cover letter and go for something short and snappy ‘no more than a paragraph’. As soon as I started doing this I got interviews. Now this may be coincedence, it may not.I think it depends a lot in the company and the application channel – for example if you are applying to a posting on a recruitment site the adverts are usually short and often annonymous. An application directly to a company will be different because it will be possible to research / know more about them than what is contained in the advert.Personally I’m not sure what function a cover letter has in the regular job Market though I can see how it could help in particular situations.I have to say though your criteria sounds extremely beuraucratic – I’m not sure yours would be a company I would like to work for anyway…
From last three years I am also working in hiring process and exactly same problem i am facing…