Cover letter
10 Easy Steps to a Great Cover Letter
Dear Reader,
If you’re applying for a good job, several candidates are bound to be competing for the same job. The last job I applied for (and have been working at for 1 1/2 years) had 40+ other applicants. How do you stand out in a good way?
You stand out by communicating that you are what they’re looking for, plus some. I wrote the below cover letter even though I didn’t realize at the time that was what it was called. What stuck out to my current employers was that they could see at a glance that I fit the job requirements and I spoke Spanish (a plus). Because I gave them my job availability dates, they were able to hold the job for me for a month before I arrived in Greenville.
Hello,
Please see my resume and see if you think I would be a good fit for this job. I will be available in August for hire. I’m a third year Bob Jones University Student and will begin classes August 27. I will be available year round in the evenings and on the weekend and I will be living in town at my own residence. The reason I’m not available sooner than August 15 is because I am finishing my job in Milwaukee, WI at Froedtert Hospital and that is the earliest I can move to Greenville.
I speak Spanish, if that’s a plus. I love dressing professionally and I have a lot of internal and external customer service experience! If you look at my resume, you’ll see that I’ve had a lot of experience within the hospital setting, and that includes Workers Compensation as well as private insurance. However, while I did work with our legal counsel on one of my cases, I’m not familiar with working with No Fault.
Just ask if you want more information or more references!
Thanks for reading!
Looking back I can see how I made several mistakes. Thankfully the message still reached my current employer. After some research, I’ve learned the proper way to write a cover letter in 10 easy steps.
#1 – Use the correct format. You can find templates of cover letters in programs that are equivalent to Microsoft Word. When I searched Microsoft Word I came up with at least 34 templates. You need to put your address and today’s date at the top left. Beneath that you write the name of the person you’re writing to, their title, the name of the company, and the company address. Keep it professional on white, cream, or light gray paper.
#2 – Make it as personal as possible. If you can address it to a particular person, do it. Consider your target audience and think about what THEY will want to hear. They want a great candidate who fits their requirements – plus some. Give them what they want to hear and then some. “Dear Robyn…..”
#3 – In your opening sentence, state why you are writing. For example, “I’m responding to a funeral home job ad you posted in Greenville News.”
#4 – Follow that up immediately with a quick reason why you specifically are good for that specific position. This is not a blanket cover letter. It’s a letter that is specific to this job and to one person. For example, “I thoroughly read the job requirements and noticed my skills and training line up exactly with your requirements.”
#5 – Next, draw attention to your resume. This cover letter should wet their appetite to learn more about how great of a fit you are for the position. “If you take a quick look at my resume you’ll notice that I have seven years experience in healthcare as well as four years training as a bilingual medical interpreter.”
#6 – Don’t just leave facts – apply them. Why are the facts on your resume relevant to the job you’re applying for? “I believe the experience I’ve had working with pediatric cancer patients is essential to understanding the families I will be counseling in this position.”
#7 – Tell a little bit about what drives you. Strip away the specifics and give them a general idea of your personality. “I’m a people person and am driven by problem solving and relationship building.”
#8 – Be knowledgeable about their company. Do your research and know the basic history and maybe names of leadership. If you know someone personally in the company, mention them. You want to be relatable and not ask stupid questions you could have found online.
#9 – Recommend a time availability for meeting. Be flexible. Move them to action. “I’m available all next week for an interview and can move my schedule around for whenever is convenient for you.”
#10 – Close with a positive word about the job and it’s relation to your future. “I’m looking forward to hearing more about the position and I am eager to learn how I can contribute to your team.”
Here was another great cover letter article by CBS that recommends using bullets for a list of your experience. It warns that no coer letter can guarantee you a job, but it does give you an edge on your competition. Keep it to a half of a page to a full page. Have fun with your cover letter writing!
Sincerely,
Andrea
Related articles
- Time is precious – save it with cover letters and elevator pitches (letterschangelives.wordpress.com)
Time is precious – save it with cover letters and elevator pitches
Dear Reader,
After a long hard week, the weekend is a precious and beautiful thing. It’s a cup of extra coffee on Saturday, a few more hours in your jammies and a call home to find out the nothing that means everything. It’s time that never seems to linger as long as we are willing to stay. It’s a sunset that sets too quickly and before you know it you’re back to five minute conversations and text message business encounters.
Increasingly, we never have time for everything – especially in the business and education world. We prioritize and make time for what is important to us, eliminating useless noise and specializing our media to one or two familiar channels.
Time is also the reason you will probably never get the job you want. This is because you will never develop a cover letter or elevator pitch. But should you make the time? Yes, and here are three reasons why:
#1 They don’t have time to hear/read your whole resume. Those directors you really want to impress don’t have more than 30 seconds to glance at you. It may be your only chance. Are you prepared to communicate in an elevator who you are and how you are relevant to them before you get to the next floor? Can you write a cover letter that communicates what you are all about and why you fit in just a 30 second glance?
#2 You want to be the best candidate. So your coworkers and friends don’t take the time. Have you ever stopped to consider the limitations you put on yourself because no one around you does certain things? How often do you miss on standing out as a strong candidate? If you want to stay on the same pay scale as your coworker or friend, then only do the minimum that they do.
#3 You are really not that special. You don’t deserve hours of people’s time to tell your story. You have to make yourself special in different ways to different people. For elevator speeches, you need to be able to adapt your message in the blink of an eye based on the audience you have in front of you. (Share experiences that are most relevant to that person first.) And for cover letters, you need to personalize your letter to someone and share most relevant skills first. This takes time and it’s impressive when you can take the time to habitually communicate the most important information about you in the time you have – even on an elevator ride.
My next two blog posts will be developing the idea of the cover letter and elevator speech. What are they? Why should you care? I truly, passionately believe that your communication always says something about you. You can never NOT communicate. If you want to be remembered as the person who would be a good fit for the job that is never posted, then you need to be prepared and take the time to be that good fit.
If you don’t take the time to develop these skills, you may always wonder why you can’t deliver in an interview. You may wonder why you didn’t make a good impression on that director. You may silently struggle with why the person at that party never did send your name up to the top. Your resume may never surface above the other hundreds.
You know you’re qualified. But if you can’t communicate that you’re qualified, you won’t be given the chance to prove it. What you say about yourself does matter.
In the meantime, here is a helpful cover letter article from About.com: Top 10 Cover Letter Writing Tips
Also, here are some great example elevator speeches from the same website: Elevator Speeches
Sincerely,
Andrea
Related articles
- How to: Write a cover letter (reed.co.uk)
- No Cover Letter, No Call? (execu-search.com)
- The Elevator Pitch (venturedesignbyjesper.wordpress.com)
- The Secret Equation To A Successful Cover Letter (collegefeed.com)
Ten Letters You Will Read and Write – yes, You!
Dear Reader,
Picture the last time you wrote a letter. Seeing dust? Let me help. It was probably a birthday card, and if you’re like me, you also chose to whack five dollars off the birthday gift to make up for the insane $4.99 you spent on the card. As you paid for the card, you spent exactly five minutes thinking about how you could have written a better card for free. But you didn’t. You signed it, licked it, mailed it and forgot about it. You may have gotten a thank you letter in return. You probably didn’t.
If you feel like letter-writing is a waste of time, don’t worry. You’re not alone. But think about it. You are not alone in believing that letter writing is a lost art. You are not alone in believing that an abbreviated tweet, a status or a disjointed email that ends up in spam will make more of a difference in your life than writing out a well-thought letter. You should worry.
According to John R. Erickson in World Magazine, “[Texting] tends to discourage the development of rich, extended thought, and it’s a poor substitute for the composition of letters.”
Ask yourself these questions.
Could there still be a time in your life when writing a letter is the most important thing you will ever do? Could letter writing still be interesting and passionate enough to make a difference? Could writing letters actually improve your writing?
Erickson goes on to say, “I’m inclined to think that the honesty and simplicity of the letter-voice brings us closer to “good writing” than a voice that is trying to impress an editor we’ve never met.”
I think it’s logical to look at letter writing as something that could change your life.
I don’t think you can avoid letter writing. I will argue that you will encounter all of the following type’s of letters in your life.
1. Cover letters. Plan on getting a job?
2. Dear John Letters. Don’t tell me you never thought about breaking up by mail. Or did she break up with you this way? Ouch, but so romantic.
3. Letters to your Senator. Right now when you hear an announcer on the radio encouraging you to write a letter to your Senator, you think he’s talking to someone else, right?
4. Customer Service Complaint Letters. Believe it or not, this will get you a corporate response, or in my case a $4 voucher for my disappointing cream cheese experience.
5. Letters you will regret. Been there. Always sleep on those angry letters before hitting send. Please, literally sleep on top of the letter and hopefully it will get lost while you’re thrashing in your sleep.
6. Letters to the Editor. This is not a luxury reserved for journalists. You, the layman, the citizen, the average Joe can write a letter to the editor of a newspaper in response to an article.
7. Love letters. Classic. Guys, she will want at least one in her lifetime.
8. Letters to a soldier. There is little more powerful and beautiful than giving encouragement to a soldier who is putting his life on the line for you. These letters are the poetry of sacrifice; a stranger who may die for a stranger who might write.
9. Thank you letters. Believe it or not, some of the best thank you letters don’t say the word “thank you” in them.
10. Letters back home. Don’t dismiss it. Writing well-developed letters may spare you that weekly phone call from your parents and can be a valuable way to connect with that rich great-aunt.
Confused about the proper format? Keep reading my blog for crazy letter-writing examples and responses you won’t believe.
Sincerely,
Andrea
Letters Change Lives 