cover letter writing Archives - Palladian Career Resources

Credible Cover Letters

When a hiring manager starts to read your cover letter and resume, you have no credibility. The reader doesn’t know you. They don’t know if they can trust you or if you are prone to exaggeration and lying.
This lack of credibility is highlighted when a job seeker leads off their cover letter with a boastful statement.

This mistake was exhibited in the cover letter I received today. The first sentence was pure hype:

When I saw your job listing I could not believe the uncanny resemblance of my experience to your specified duties.

Claims like this are common, but are unlikely to be believed. If you were hiring and received a bunch of resumes with claims like this, would you believe all of them? You can’t. Every applicant isn’t perfect.

In reviewing the job and resume closely, the candidate’s qualifications are not ideal. The job seeker had no experience in the industry of the company and the job seeker did not have a key technical skill. The candidate does have experience with most of the responsibilities of the positions.

A much better approach for this job seeker would have been to focus on the experience and skills of the job seeker. The job seeker was pursuing an industrial sales position and has extensive sales experience. A better start to the cover letter would have been:

I am a highly successful sales professional, with more than 25 years of industrial and technical sales experience, and am interested in your technical sales opportunity.

This sentence starts to establish some credibility by showing the candidate’s 25 years of experience. The next step is to show the performance of the job seeker through examples of his track record of success. A couple accomplishments will make a good impression.

When you write your cover letter, make sure you focus on substance and not hype.

Don’t Highlight Your Age

I worked with a job seeker interested in returning to the workforce after several years of retirement. Like many people today, the combination of falling housing values and a large drop in the stock market have reduced the retirement savings well below what was expected. To maintain the standard of living, this individual decided a part time job would help. The job seeker is also excited to return to working after several years off.

I reviewed the cover letter written by the job seeker. In it, he calls attention to his extensive sales experience. This individual worked in sales for just over forty years. This makes it easy to figure of the age of the job seeker.

Many people report encountering age discrimination. How common it is and how likely this job seeker is to encounter it are tough to estimate. There are companies who will not discriminate, and there probably are some who will. Knowing how big a factor age discrimination might be for this individual is impossible to tell.

A job seeker can raise or lower the odds of encountering age discrimination. You are not required to tell an employer your age. You also don't need to tell an employer key information that allows the calculation of your age – for example, a high school graduation date should not be listed on your resume.

The individual's cover letter included a sentence highlighting the 40+ years of sales experience the job seeker possesses. Highlighting the sales experience is good, but there is little need for emphasizing 40+ years.

The job seeker had held several positions over his career, and we decided to omit from his resume several at the start of his career. The resume showed more than twenty years of work experience. Omitting the first few positions does nothing to obscure the candidate's experience or potential. An entry level position forty years ago will not make a difference in a person's marketability today.

In the cover letter, we changed the 40+ years of experience to 30+ years of experience. It is still accurate – the candidate has more than 30 years of experience. It is just less precise. The difference in the presentation expands the potential age range of the job seeker. With more than forty years of experience and several years of retirement, the job seeker should be in his mid to late sixties. Changing the cover letter to thirty plus years changes this potential range to mid fifties and older.

This is a small change but it makes the age of the job seeker less of a factor and this may reduce the chance of age discrimination.

A Cover Letter Without Complete Sentences

I read a cover letter today that didn’t have a single complete sentence. Each sentence was written without a subject and many didn’t have a verb. The letter was nothing more than a collection of phrases and buzzwords. I’ve included most of the cover letter below, with identifying information removed.

Twenty years of sales experience with a proven track record and many achievements to mention! Caring and compassion to provide patients with quality products is important. Enjoy running a territory as if it was my own business and exceed at building and maintaining both new and existing relationships to maximize sales growth. Extensive experience calling on key personnel within hospitals and surgery centers.

This letter reads like a resume. It is common to omit the personal pronouns from a resume. This is the accepted style. In fact, the paragraph from the cover letter, with a few changes, could be used as a professional summary at the top of the resume.

A cover letter is different. The goal of a cover letter is to grab the attention of the reader and motivate them to want to read the resume. To do this, you need to make a connection with reader. Cover letters are direct, one-on-one communications between a job seeker and a hiring manager. It should be written like a business letter, with a personal, but professional style. The letter above does not fit this mold.

The first sentence of a cover letter should be direct and simple. It should have subject-verb-object structure. I read cover letters routinely that have complicated structures. This just discourages me from reading the entire cover letter. One of the sentence structures I do not like takes a modifying phrase and moves it to the beginning of the sentence. For example, “Possessing 10 years of experience in the widget industry, I have excellent management skills and an ability to drive performance and cut cost.” I would prefer a much more direct format. For example, “I have excellent management skills, gained through 10 years in the widget industry, enabling me to drive performance and cut costs.”

The cover letter I received is nothing more than a collection of phrases. After reading the first line, my impression was confusion. The structure did not fit what I expected. Now, it only took a second or two to figure out the format and structure, and this may seem inconsequential. The problem with this cover letter is that my first reaction was negative and my focus, even if for only a couple seconds, was on structure, not the content of the cover letter. The end effect was to cause me to question whether I should read the cover letter just a few seconds after looking at it.

It is important to remember that hiring managers screen large numbers of resumes at a time. Your cover letter and resume may only get a 15 to 30 look before the reader decides to discard it. This requires a structure and style that can be easily understood.