UpToEleven.ca

Rands has an article up today with some good advice for getting your resume looked at. Having been in a position where I was regularly looking through piles of resumes, and having recently been on the job market myself, I completely agree with a lot of what he suggests.

The one suggestion I disagree with is:

Never include a cover letter: I don’t read them. Recruiters don’t pass them on. Make sure the key points of your cover letter are living in your career objective and your job history.

Rands might not read them, it might be true that recruiters don’t always pass them on and it’s definitely the case that any key points that you would include in your cover letter should also be in your resume proper. That said, a good cover letter can be used to draw attention to specific areas of your experience that make you an especially good candidate for a particular position.

The key parts in that last bit were “good cover letter” and “particular position.”

In other words, you’re not going to have HR departments banging down your door with a generic cover letter that you’re sending out with every application. Just like a reader is only going to spend 30 seconds skimming your resume, they’re also only going to spend 30 seconds skimming your cover letter. If it’s full of eye-glazing stock phrases like “planned, designed, and coordinated engineers efforts for the development of a mission critical system” your potential employer is going to quickly dismiss your letter as being content-free boilerplate.

On the other hand, if you can point to specific experience that meshes with specific needs of an employer, they might just be encouraged to spend a little more time looking at your resume to see if you really are such a good fit. If you’re applying for a job at a startup and have previous experience in the sort of jack-of-all-trades role that startups so often need, draw that out. Does a previous job that’s otherwise unrelated to development give you some added insight into the company’s domain? Talk about that.

A well-constructed cover letter is your opportunity to shape how a potential employer looks at your resume. Even just the fact that you took the time to write a customized cover letter itself sends the message that you’re really interested in the job you’re applying to.

The downside is that creating a good cover letter requires research and thought - you need to have some understanding of what a company is looking for in a candidate and you need to spend some time thinking about why you meet their needs better than another candidate. If you’re applying to positions en masse you’re probably not going to find the time to craft a solid cover letter and Rands’ advice applies: don’t bother with a letter at all.

A good cover letter isn’t guaranteed to get looked at. I’d wager that the larger the company you’re applying to the lower the chance that a cover letter will make it through the various levels of recruiters and keyword-matchers - that’s another aspect of “knowing your audience.” But if you’ve got the time - and once you’ve got a couple to use as templates creating customized letters shouldn’t take more than half an hour or so - they can really make the difference between someone quickly skimming your resume (and potentially missing the best bits) and that same reader realizing just how good a fit you are.