Do I really have to spell out the answer to your question?

You should consider hiring people because good candidates are hard to find. And if you want to know whether or not they're a good fit for the position, engage them in a conversation and ask. Don't expect applicants to do your job for you, the good candidates have better things to do than write you a letter before you even bother to talk to them.

One characteristic of a good applicant is a sincere interest in working for the company. A resume with no cover letter is a sign of a candidate who is blindly spraying out resumes.

You can increase your chances of getting hired at a specific company by tenfold of you focus your efforts. Usually this means getting to know people at the company, understanding which departments and projects you may fit.

Can you clarify "focus your efforts?"

For example, I am a graduate software engineer. There are a lot of companies that I have a more than sincere interest in working for - I have a near obsession for working for, say, Google, Amazon, Dropbox, or Facebook. I also have a desire to pay my bills. All 4 of the above have rejected me for "lack of years of experience," and so now what? Find more companies I sincerely want to work for? At this point, a company with a software engineering team I can learn from fits the bill, of which there's probably 3,000 in the Bay Area alone. So, I don't understand how my options at this point are anything other than literally sending out 3,000 resumes (I'm at 80 now). Other than, of course, extensive networking, which I also do.

Are you honestly telling me you can't tell the difference between a candidate spraying out resumes and a candidate worth talking to without a cover letter?

Are you honestly sure that writing a cover letter is a good signal?

The standard advice is to submit a cover letter, so many standard candidates spraying applications do. There's someone just a few comments over who wrote 53 cover letters when applying to jobs.

You still think cover letters are about focus?

I absolutely agree with your last sentence though. Bypassing the initial resume screen by talking to an actual engineer makes far more sense, but frankly you don't want to be too aggressive about it because then random people will start pestering your engineers all the time just to be considered.

>There's someone a few comments over

That's me, we're in the comment chain for it right now. I don't understand what else I can do to get a job as someone a.) new to the city and b.) a graduate software engineer with no prior experience other than personal and group projects. None of my "passion about" companies will take me - dropbox rejected me in 30 minutes flat, probably automatically. What can I do but spray out absurd amount of resumes? What can I do but have an auto-generated cover letter that swaps out COMPANY_NAME and JOB_TITLE so I can crank out enough resumes a day to ensure I get a job before my bills swamp me?

A good applicant is someone who has the skills to do the job well. Full stop.

You can increase your chances of an interview marginally through a significant investment of time, but you'll get more interviews by spraying resumes. Especially good candidates with valuable skills.

Of course, but you can't tell a good candidate by just asking them. You have to pick up signs they are a good candidate. One of them is a good cover letter.

What positions do you have that a good cover letter is a strong positive signals indicating that the person will be good at the job? If it's a writing or communications position, I fully understand. If it's for software engineering, cover letters serve more to stroke corporate egos than they do to provide critical job skill information.

Good candidates are especially hard to find if they're not willing to identify themselves.

I consider the cover letter important when I'm a hiring manager. It shows that you're interested enough in the job to try for it, to make a bit of effort. I've never been in a position where there were few enough applicants that I could have a conversation with every one of them - the cover letter is a brief of their half of that first 'why should you work here' discussion.

My opinion goes the opposite way when I am being aggressively recruited. So, I think it's on the person asking for something (to be offered a job, or to leave a current job) that should be showing their willingness to make the sale.

> Good candidates are especially hard to find if they're not willing to identify themselves.

Again. That is your problem to solve, not theirs. Good candidates don't need to worry about making sure you see them, they'll either just work for a different company where they happen to have more friends or they'll bypass the first line hiring process entirely by calling up a colleague and telling them to make sure whoever is doing the hiring bothers to call them back.

Your attitude will change when the market does. Trust me it will.

If mine will change to deal with a market we're not in right now, yours should change to deal with the market we are in right now. :)

My resume spells out, in thorough detail, why someone would consider hiring me. A cover letter is, for the most part, redundant and anecdotal. The one time I submitted a cover letter was to indicate that I had some experience with a very particular field that wasn't reflected in my resume.

> My resume spells out, in thorough detail, why someone would consider hiring me.

I always thought that the resume should explain why someone would want to hire me ("look, I'm smart, know some stuff, and did some cool things!"), while the cover letter explains why you in particular want to hire me.

I had very good look writing cover letters where I pulled apart the job description and explained how my experience (described on the attached resume) fit with each of the requirements.

I've included a few lines into my resume that serve as a microscopic cover letter. They did get noticed a lot last time I changed jobs.

And no, I did not write cover letters. A short phone / email exchange usually told the company if I'm an on-site interview material, and equally told me whether the company is worth being interviewed with.

Exactly. Plus it's a way in a few paragraphs to show you understand what the company does, tie in your related experience to that company and how you would benefit them, and generally pitch yourself as a suitable candidate to the company.