Tips to writing a good cover letter:
By Cham Posted Date: January 25, 2017
A cover letter if it serves its purpose correctly will help your application stand out from the rest of the pack. If not enough attention is payed to the cover letter then it can result in making the candidate look like a copy-paster who lacks creativity. It’s very important to pay attention to your cover letter and what you are saying especially considering the vast majority of applicants have cover letters that read more or less the same. You don’t want to be one of them, most hiring managers wouldn’t read through a generic cover letter knowing very well that it has that same copy-paste style of speech.
Below are some good tips on how to write a great cover letter:
- Don’t repeat your resume again: Most applicants tend to write cover letters like they were an excerpt or paragraph from their resumes. The fact is the cover letter will be going along with your resume so it’s always a good idea to avoid repeating the same information again in the cover letter. Instead make use of your cover letter to give the hiring managers an insight into your personality, curiosity and interest in the field you are applying to work in. Include information about experiences you have encountered that support your expertise in the field and how you dealt with them.
- Don’t make it too long, short is sweet: Sometimes less is more, have about 3 paragraphs or half a page at the most. Skip long introductions and get right into the juicy interesting information.
- Try to find out who you are writing to: Yes, sometimes this can be difficult and you don’t know who you are addressing the letter to, in which case you would go with “Dear Hiring Manager” or “To Whom It May Concern”. But its always a good idea to try to identify exactly whom you are writing to and address the person directly – this can be viewed as initiative by the person.
- Send it as a PDF: Not all office computers support word document or .docx files but almost everyone can open a PDF without having to convert the file. So always try to save your files as a PDF before you send them through. (There are free office plugins that you can use to save word files as PDF)