What is the Key to Write a Great Cover Letter?
Can there be such a thing as the perfect resume cover letter? If true, what does it contain?
Well, let’s examine what a great cover letter contains. It is addressed to an employee in the company at hand; it calls out a position in which you are interested; it lays out your qualifications for the position; and it finishes with a time-based action statement such as, “I will call your office to schedule an interview.” If your resume cover letter does not include at least these basic elements, it will not get you any results.
All right, let’s talk about the first challenge… how should the letter be sent? Let me tell you, if we want the “perfect” resume cover letter, your cover letter should probably not start with, “To Whom It May Concern” or “Dear Hiring Manager”. It should be sent to a specific appropriate individual in the company. In the ideal situation, this will be the employee who will make the decision, the individual to whom the newly hired employee will report. Your fall back plan is a key manager with influence or someone that will send your resume on receipt to the right person. If all else fails, you can send your resume and resume cover letter to a manager in the HR function. This at least will get your resume cover letter a brief reading before it gets passed on or placed into the candidate management system used by the company.
If you have a colleague employed at the company, see if you can’t get their permission to receive and forward on your resume. Or, get a contact name and email address from them and ask if you can refer to their name in the email… “I received your email address from John Smith, your Customer Services Manager.” An introduction like that will often get your resume cover letter read and forwarded to the hiring manager. Don’t immediately presume that you have no entry points at the company. Check out networking sites like LinkedIn or Plaxo which will let you search by company. These sites will not only display current employees, but will tell you if an employee has previously worked at a company. There could be someone you know quite well that left the firm on good terms that can provide you a contact and allow you to use them as a reference.
If you can’t identify someone at the company, how do you come up with the name and email address of a person in the organization? This is fairly easily accomplished these days with the amount of information available on the web. All you have to do is spend some time on the firm’s website and an internet search engine like Google. You can most likely find the necessary information on the “about us”, “management team”, “contact us”, or “news” pages of the company’s website. All companies have a pattern to the their email addresses (it can be something like firstname.lastname-at-company.com or firstinitial+lastname-at-company.com). When you have the pattern used for email addresses and the name of your contact it’s easy to construct their likely email address with a certain amount of confidence. You may have a little challenge with nicknames; often “James” will go by “jim” in his email address. If this is an executive, the mail server will be configured to forward emails addressed to either name through. When you send an email and it is returned undeliverable, just try again with a different pattern.
This approach will get your resume cover letter and resume in the door. In later discussions we’ll talk about the key elements that should be in your resume cover letter so that your resume gets more than a few seconds of attention.
MyExecutiveCompass is an employment website dedicated to helping candidates differentiate themselves in today’s competitive market. Candidates can find tips on how to deal with many job search challenges as well as cover letter templates and resume software to make the job search process more effective.
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