7 ms·

Who is even looking at cover letters at all?

kergonath 2y ago
I suspect it depends on the field, but in my experience it’s often a good indicator of success. A shoddy letter betrays a lack of professionalism. If you’re not going to spend 10 minutes running a spell checker it means that either it’s not important to you, so good bye, or that your standards are really low and you will keep producing garbage if I hire you, so good bye as well. The problem with cover letters is false positive (people who did not write the letter themselves, or who did it to a much higher standard than their usual). But then, that’s what interviews are for. I did hire a couple of people with either a subpar CV (some good people sometimes end up in dead ends or difficult situations), or cover letter (not everyone is a great writer), or reference (your issues with your former boss are not always your fault), or interview (you can have a bad day), so I would not rely on a single factor. But a combination of 2 dodgy elements is an automatic rejection. Each one tends to surface different aspects.
- ungreased0675 2y ago
  Consider that job seekers today sometimes have to apply to hundreds of positions before being hired. For most of those applications, they won’t hear anything back. Given that dynamic, would you spend time polishing a cover letter for each application?
  - badwolf 2y ago
    My recent job hunt was over 1700 applications. Nobody is spending 10 minutes writing a cover letter. Companies that are getting hundreds to thousands of applications are not reading every cover letter.
  - kergonath 2y ago
    In my field, certainly. We expect them to prepare a presentation for the interview as well. Our pond is not large enough, there are not hundreds of positions to apply to.
- mock-possum 2y ago
  I guess my thing is that I don’t want to jump through hoops, I want to write code. You know how some people are enamored of those little ‘shit tests’ for relationships, they think they’re really clever? I have no patience for that. Show me who you are and I’ll show you who I am, and if we like eachother, then let’s try to get together and see what we could build together. if the entire interview process is a series of hoops that you dictate I jump through to even have a chance with you, then why should I expect my future with you to be any different? I don’t want that. I don’t want to write a carefully crafted letter pretending that I want anything other than respect and money and a chance to do work on interesting from a potential employer. I just want to write code. The rest of it is extensive shit testing in my book and I have no patience for that. I don’t put up with that kind of treatment from anyone else - what makes you think dangling money in front of me would change my mind about that?

I suspect it depends on the field, but in my experience it’s often a good indicator of success. A shoddy letter betrays a lack of professionalism. If you’re not going to spend 10 minutes running a spell checker it means that either it’s not important to you, so good bye, or that your standards are really low and you will keep producing garbage if I hire you, so good bye as well. The problem with cover letters is false positive (people who did not write the letter themselves, or who did it to a much higher standard than their usual). But then, that’s what interviews are for. I did hire a couple of people with either a subpar CV (some good people sometimes end up in dead ends or difficult situations), or cover letter (not everyone is a great writer), or reference (your issues with your former boss are not always your fault), or interview (you can have a bad day), so I would not rely on a single factor. But a combination of 2 dodgy elements is an automatic rejection. Each one tends to surface different aspects.

ungreased0675 2y ago
Consider that job seekers today sometimes have to apply to hundreds of positions before being hired. For most of those applications, they won’t hear anything back. Given that dynamic, would you spend time polishing a cover letter for each application?
- badwolf 2y ago
  My recent job hunt was over 1700 applications. Nobody is spending 10 minutes writing a cover letter. Companies that are getting hundreds to thousands of applications are not reading every cover letter.
- kergonath 2y ago
  In my field, certainly. We expect them to prepare a presentation for the interview as well. Our pond is not large enough, there are not hundreds of positions to apply to.
mock-possum 2y ago
I guess my thing is that I don’t want to jump through hoops, I want to write code. You know how some people are enamored of those little ‘shit tests’ for relationships, they think they’re really clever? I have no patience for that. Show me who you are and I’ll show you who I am, and if we like eachother, then let’s try to get together and see what we could build together. if the entire interview process is a series of hoops that you dictate I jump through to even have a chance with you, then why should I expect my future with you to be any different? I don’t want that. I don’t want to write a carefully crafted letter pretending that I want anything other than respect and money and a chance to do work on interesting from a potential employer. I just want to write code. The rest of it is extensive shit testing in my book and I have no patience for that. I don’t put up with that kind of treatment from anyone else - what makes you think dangling money in front of me would change my mind about that?