Cover Letters:
Do Your Homework For Show And Tell
Contributed by Sheri Graves
Now that you’ve got your resume ready to submit, it’s time to come up with a great cover letter. But don’t waste your time–and that of your target employer–by using your cover letter to summarize your resume. You have precious few moments to impress the company’s hiring specialist. Redundancy doesn’t serve your best interests.
Keep in mind that each thing you do in your job search serves an objective. Your cover letter needs to be dynamic enough to spark the interest necessary to even look at your resume. Your resume must be strong enough to prompt the impulse to call you to schedule a face-to-face interview. The interview is what gets you the job.
Before writing your cover letter, think of the elementary school classroom activity called “Show and Tell.” Your resume is the “Tell”–It’s where you tell about your qualifications for the job you seek. Your cover letter is the “Show”–It’s where you show how hiring you would benefit your prospective employer.
It isn’t enough to say, “I’m a can-do kind of guy who meets deadlines and usually has something extra to add to the mix.” Instead, you illustrate your worth through both specifics and broad strokes. To accomplish this task, you need to do your homework.
Start by researching the company you’ve chosen as your target employer. Assuming you’ve chosen an entity that is publicly traded on the stock market, go to the company’s Web site and access information intended for investors. Read the most recent annual report. See where the company has been and where it is going. Check out its projections for the future.
Next, access any recent news articles published about the company. Any major business that’s hiring should have had some kind of coverage in the local press if not the national media.
Armed with knowledge about your target’s history and objectives, you’re in a position to figure out how you can use your education, experience and job skills to assist the company in reaching its goals. In a cover letter to ABC, Inc., you might begin like this:
“Your company certainly has created quite a buzz with its announced plans to merge with XYZ Corp. Combining XYZ’s strong customer service reputation with ABC’s well-known product reliability tells me you are ready to embark on some major marketing.
“That’s where I come in. As my enclosed resume shows, I bring a wealth of experience to the table. Thinking about your pending merger has prompted me to put together a rough draft marketing plan that implements elements of my previous and wildly successful campaign for DEF-CO last year as well as some new, innovative approaches to brand recognition that I have developed in recent weeks.
“I’m eager to discuss my ideas with you personally and look forward to the interview process.”
This kind of cover letter tells your prospective employer three important things about you as a job candidate:
- You have enough respect for the employer to find out something about the company before sending in a resume.
- You are a professional who can hit the ground running and won’t need a great deal of on-the-job training.
- You take your work seriously enough to prepare for the next step–the interview–before even getting the call.
Your cover letter also is the place where you highlight some of your skills. This can be done with brief mentions of a few computer programs with which you’re familiar. Work this information into a paragraph that describes how you can use these skills for the benefit of the company. Try something like this:
“I believe a good product promotion incorporates solid research skills with marketing savvy, and I utilize a wide range of computer programs to accomplish this goal. For example, I’m noted for my Microsoft® Outlook® troubleshooting and have conducted Microsoft PowerPoint® training for previous employers.”
Your cover letter should be no more than one page and, in fact, should not fill that page. There should be plenty of white space. Formatting the letter is simple.
- Your name, address, telephone number and e-mail address form the basis of your letterhead thusly:
Mary Marvelous
1234 Tranquility Lane, Fabulous City, Colorado 98765-1234
(303) 555-1234 marymarvelous@aol.com
- Skip two spaces and indent just past center to write the date.
- Skip two spaces and write the address as it will appear on the envelope. Whenever possible, address your cover letter to someone specific, using that person’s name. Sometimes an employment ad will instruct applicants to send resumes to “HR Director.” It doesn’t hurt to pick up the telephone to find out who that person is. The address might look like this:
Sandra Somebody
Human Resources Director
ABC, Inc.
5566 Enterprise Road
Fabulous City, CO 98765-5566
- Skip one space. Now insert the job title you seek. It should look like this:
RE: Marketing Director
- Skip one space. Write the letter. It should be single-spaced. Skip a space between paragraphs. Try to limit the letter to three or four paragraphs.
- After the last paragraph, skip two spaces. Indent to the “date” spot just past center to sign off with “Sincerely.”
- Skip three spaces. Indent to the same spot just past center. Type your name. When you print out your letter, your signature should be just above your typed name.
Forget about colored paper and fancy fonts. They don’t impress hiring specialists.
Microsoft, Outlook, and PowerPoint are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
About the Author:
Sheri Graves is a freelance writer living in Santa Rosa, California.
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