I don’t really get asked about cover letters anymore. I still get asked about CVs all the time; how best to format, what to leave in and leave out, whether to include a photo or not, can it be longer than 1 page? etc etc
Cover letters, however, seem more and more to be a ghost of recruitment past.
Firms don’t seem to ask for cover letters much anymore either. Internal recruiters and hiring managers no doubt want to keep the paperwork to review down to a minimum, and maybe the modern-day attention span plays a part here too. Nowadays we’re all more hard-wired to seek out headlines, flashy formatting and attention-grabbing keywords.
But while the cover letter itself may be on the way out, the concepts behind it certainly aren’t. The idea behind a well thought-out cover letter was always to appear thoughtful and professional, as someone interested who does their research, someone who can write well and concisely – basically to help you stand out from the crowd.
Is it still possible to get all that across if we remove the cover letter? Of course it is. We just need to view it differently now. It’s not just the traditional one page of self-promotion anymore, it’s more than that…
View your cover letter now as the body of the email you attached your CV to, or that first chat with the recruiter, or the introductory Teams call with the hiring manager. View your cover letter as represented by what you wear to the first face-to-face interview, or what questions you ask to your potential new boss, or how convincing you can be that you really want this role and you and the person across the table would work really well together.
Funnily enough it may be even more important now than it ever was. It’s a more all-encompassing concept now.
It will still do what it always has; help you get through the door, but now it will also help you stand out when face-to-face, show that the cultural fit is right, and help reassure the interviewer that they’ve found the right person to join their team.
In this world of application excess, how you fill in the gap left by the absence of that piece of paper might just determine whether you succeed or not. And that’s far more important than whether or not you have a photo on your CV.
- Tariq Siraj