You might send out 20 resumes. As a hiring manager - especially when using a "no filter" approach like posting on here (keep in mind that IME people posting jobs on Hacker News are more likely doing "guerilla hiring" and circumvent their HR departments) - I easily get 100+ resumes, and I don't have days to spend trawling through them. I think it was rands of randsinrepose who mentioned before that the average time an HR person or a manager gets to spend on figuring out if a deeper dive is worth it is about 30s.

So I have to filter them by something. If you as an applicant - who would like at least an interview with me -can't even put in the effort to write in a few sentences that tell me why I should look at your resume, I somehow have to assume that you'll put in similar effort after I hire you. That's not a good first impression and IMHO it counts when you're dealing with a hiring manager as opposed to an HR department.

Keep in mind I'm not asking you to write a cover novel. Put yourself in my shoes and tell me which of the resumes you'd look at if you have only limited time:

1. The one that says

"My resume attached", or fewer words to that effect

2. The one that says

"Hey, I'm applying for your job opening because I love writing web apps in Ruby on Rails with a ClojureScript front end".

Your strategy is yours to choose.

PS: I had someone insist on the opposite process where they only looked at people who HR rejected, their team was awesome if a little odd.

Clearly this is not going to scale, but it really depends more on other companies being defective not a poor culture at your company.

PS: I am more of the opinion that focusing on great people is a mistake. Most competent people can be great, when in a role and team that fits them.

This seems like a reasonable deal to me.

You do need to demonstrate that you can solve the problems of the potential employer.

People advertising for a job have a business problem to solve. If you can demonstrate that not only can you solve that problem but that you have solved similar problems for other businesses before, then you stand a greater chance of making it through to an interview.

However, software engineering is not such a job. A cover letter showcasing a software engineer's ability to author vaguely reality-flavored prose and get past the HR drone doing the reading is not showcasing their ability to perform critical job functions to address business needs. Such an engineer is spending significant amounts of their time to tick a prediction-value-free box on someone else's ill-informed list.

I've literally never had a good experience with a company that wanted a cover letter. I've done it dozens of times. In every single case, with precisely zero exceptions, it's produced no value for me. I've been on the other end of hiring processes as well, and there I've similarly found precisely zero value in cover letters across dozens of cases. Fact-dense and fluff-light resumes are much more valuable.

Code samples? Great! Toy problems? Great! Prose? Not so great.

Do you need help solving the problem you appear to have where you may be misevaluating candidates by measuring them wrong? I have some ideas! It could be costing you the best candidates!

> I've literally never had a good experience with a company that wanted a cover letter.

To provide a counter point, for a recent contracting job, I got an interview with a cover letter only (no resume), and then the position.

I had responded to a 'we're hiring' link at the end of a technical blog post (linked to from HN). I wrote a brief email introducing myself and talking about the value I thought could bring to the company (with links to examples of prior, related work), and that led to follow up emails and an interview. I don't think it would have gone any further if I had just sent an email saying 'Please find my resume attached' and then sent a generic resume.

When I'm applying to a company of greater than fifty or so people, I tend to assume that any general-purpose resume-inbox will be read primarily by an HR person or recruiter. Not personally by a hiring manager. That would almost certainly be a poor use of time.

What, precisely, does a cover letter show that a well-composed resume doesn't for an in-house full-time engineer? A willingness to accept the received wisdom that authoring prose on demand demonstrates critical core competencies for software engineering job performance, perhaps?

To cap it all off, I've found that at scale the improved response rate from submitting applications with cover letters doesn't justify the increased time spent applying. Doing the reading and writing to create a halfway decent cover letter takes at a minimum 10x the time it takes to click "Apply with LinkedIn".

What if the all the people who tell how they love writing web apps in RoR are just bullshitting you in the hopes that you really believe it? What if they're mostly just very excited newbies who haven't yet had the time to figure out that maybe it's not so exciting and lovely after all?

I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, but it sounds like you choose very arbitrary filters. Not that I can recommend a better filter, if your time is indeed so limited.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head about the filters - they have some arbitrariness to them, and most people outside (and, if my experience is anything to go by, inside) HR use filters that work for them based on experience in the past. I'm not saying they are fair and unbiased (they aren't), but they work for that particular person.

I for example would perfectly OK with you emailing me (if I were hiring, which I'm not) a cover email that says something like "I have the skills you're looking for, I like the area your company is in, and I'm looking for a job that allows me to bring my dog to work and have a work/life balance". That's again specific to the hiring manager tho', I'd take refreshing honesty over someone trying to visibly BS me any day.

What a lot of people don't immediately see is that if a company is hiring, they're not looking to hire your resume - they're hiring a person (which a specific skill set) that they're going to spend 8-10h/day with. A cover email can convey more about you personally than a list of past accomplishments.

You don't need to say you love writing web apps in RoR, but you should at least say that you are good at writing web apps in RoR (if that's the position being hired). If you have real world examples you can point to of things you have built as well as approximate site load/scale stats, even better.

You don't need to love the work, but you do need to be able to solve the problems the business is facing. In my experience, the better you are able to convey that, the better your likelihood of getting an interview and then a job.

Probably not. If someone is doing something they don't like, they tend to stop doing it so well as time goes on. While it may work out for a while, people usually need to care at some level about what they're doing to do a good job. Not everyone, sure, but I wouldn't take the chance.

There is also a lot more to working than just doing a job. Working around people who don't care about their work is demoralizing.

Maybe it's not so common in SV startups that insist on hiring lovers. But in other industries it might be more of a rule than an exception.

Plus, I assume that the NY area + security engineering has a lot of companies competing.

It is your job to look through resume's. This is what you are paid to do. You claim to be a hiring manager. It is not my responsibility to convince you to do the job you are paid to do. My resume contains all the information you need to make the determination of whether I am qualified for the job, including "I love writing web apps in Ruby on Rails with a ClojureScript front end" adds nothing to the application but does waste my time.

As such, it is up to them how much time they spend hiring, and it is up to them what heuristics they use in that. Because, ultimately, time spent on hiring is time they're not spending actually helping the other team members who they have already hired, and it is only indirectly related to actually delivering the thing they are supposed to deliver (whereas they may have demands on their time that -directly- affect the delivery).

It is also up to you whether or not you try to help them by showing you have actually read the posting, and know something about the company, and whatever other heuristic they have. That's totally your prerogative. But you do not have -any- standing to fault someone whose job is delivering something with not considering you because you didn't want to put in some effort.

I agree with this point. Writing that sort of sentence is meaningless fluff.

That being said, you need to think of things from the position of the people hiring you. The manager is going to give the tech lead a bunch of resumes and cover letters and ask them to read through them and make a short list of 5 (or whatever) to interview.

If they are looking to hire someone to build RoR web apps with a ClojureScript front end, then you make the tech lead's job easier if your resume and cover letter highlight your experience building RoR web apps with a ClojureScript front end - or if you don't have that, at least point out how your other experience means you can still solve their problem.

While it is possible that a generic resume contains all the information needed to make a determination of whether you are qualified for the job, you should be emphasizing the parts relevant to the current job so the person putting together a short list doesn't have to study your resume, instead, they can look at your application for 30 seconds and go:

Yep, yep, yep, wow this person has everything we're looking for, onto the short list they go.

Because here's the thing. The tech lead is usually a busy person and they've got better things to do than spend and hour or two sifting through resumes.

When I've had to do it, I'd take a quick first pass through all the resumes and put them in one of three piles: easy yes, easy no and maybe.

If all the relevant information is in your resume but I have to hunt around for it, then you'll likely end up on the maybe pile.

If I get through the stack of resumes and my easy yes pile has enough candidates, then the maybe pile doesn't get a further look, because I'm trying to minimize the time I have to spend looking at resumes.

I diligently entered cover letter and resume information into a spreadsheet when hiring, and to be perfectly honest, the only correlation I could find between cover letter + resume and interview results was resume length.

What I have is interviewing lots and lots of people over a couple of decades, first contributing to hiring decisions and eventually making them myself. As developers you see patterns emerge and you start making use of them. For a halfway efficient review process you have to make a first pass over the resume submissions and whittle the pile down to a manageable size quickly, making use of patterns spotted in the past.

In that respect, my experience tells me that "no cover email at all" = "shotgunned resume to every job listing" = "not a good fit". That might not always be the case, but it's an 80/20 rule. Yes, I'll potentially overlook a couple of qualified candidates, but I'm probably already doing this after work instead of spending time with my family because I've decided to essentially circumvent the HR department.

Part of the cover letter conundrum is that if you come in through the front door (ie, the official job listing curated by HR), your resume is likely landing in some HR system and the hiring manager might not even see it. In that case, it's a total waste of effort.

If you're coming in through the "back door", say, via a post here on Hacker News, there is a good chance that your first contact is the actual hiring manager. She or he will probably at least skim your cover email.

Number two strikes me as trite enough to earn negative points, particularly the use of 'love'.

But assuming the cover letter doesn't matter is as much of a mistake as assuming industry experience, or years of experience, or having gone to a particular school doesn't matter.

a) different companies prioritize different things, even if the requirements list is the same.

b) small things can get your application silently rejected (or more often, delegated to a 'maybe we'll come back to them' virtual pile), because employers get dozens of applications (hundreds over multiple positions) and the cost of interviewing is high (and worth noting, much higher than your cost of writing a cover letter).

If you're a programmer and you're approaching problems this way, I most likely don't want to hire you. Strike a balance between automation and giving a personal touch where it's necessary.

Dear Sir and Madam, i always greatly admired the spaghettis <autosearched product> growing in your <companysname> yard. The idea of adding <featurename> to <autosearched product> was asthma taking and diamond. Now finding myself, in need and desire to accomplish, a similar feet, ladder jump several feet deep up, i hereby apply for your post <jobname mined> which i will embrace with great pressure on passion fruit and tail end.

RegEx full Regards

I'd rather hear from someone specifically interested in this job vs someone looking for just any job.

Note that most of them do not even read the résumé either, since they often obviously go through it for the first time while they call you on the phone.

As a hiring manager, I love a good cover letter.

So no, I don't see it the way you describe.

Weird way to look at it. I would think a company that would accept a one sentence cover letter would also accept a longer cover letter, but that the inverse wouldn't be true.

As such, wouldn't a classic job seeker always sell to the longer-letter requirement, since they are otherwise automatically disqualifying themselves from an unknown percentage of employers?

People might also think that since companies are still crying about the shortage of programmers it's still a "renter's market" and that enough employers are desperate enough to not squabble over missing cover letters.

But I still have no great theory about why people wouldn't have at least a single paragraph about themselves that they paste into emails to make them seem slightly more personal.

I realize that getting to this point takes time, and usually involves working in the same town for a good while. But when you can do it it's a nice way to get your resume on someone's desk for real consideration rather than, say, getting culled by a recruiter because you don't have the exact incantation they were told to look for.

I've never found that. In fact I've found just the opposite.

I've always tailored cover letters and CVs to highlight the points mentioned in the job description and why I can solve them, and I've always had a high rate of applications to interviews and then jobs.

It makes the job of the person sorting through CVs that much easier.

I've been on both sides of the table, and if you have 100+ CVs to go through, the short cover letter+CV that covers most of the issues raised in the job description will almost always make it to the short list for interviews.

Whenever I apply for a job, I always take the time to write a good cover letter. Why wouldn't you maximize your chances?

You're describing what worked for you. You don't know what works for other companies that are hiring.

You don't know the percentage of companies that look for the same things you do, the percentage that use an automated resume filter that simply ignores cover letters, the percentage that do something entirely weird and unexpected, the percentage that believe the cover letter is much less relevant than an active Github profile - and so on.

I wish employers would stop making this basic mistake. If you want a cover email, ask for one. Don't assume that you have an industry-standard application process (you don't - no one does), that applicants who don't match your unspoken requirements are bad (they may or may not be - you have no more information than anyone else does), that your special hiring process quirk gives you a deeper insight into applicant quality than any of the tens of other possible hiring quirks (it doesn't), or that your company is special enough to ignore all of the above (it isn't.)

If you want to articulate that you're looking for personalities with enhanced conscientiousness as an explicit hiring goal, that's one thing, especially if you're willing to trade off other qualities in the Big Five.

But randomly picking an action and assuming it gives you hire/fire information with no further context doesn't seem usefully rigorous.

Most companies around these parts use similar services for resume intake, and those that don't seem to use email.

For the former, I haven't seen a resume handling service that doesn't have a "Cover Letter" text field, so if we can stipulate that those are common enough, why would an applicant leave it blank?

For the email case, it's a bit cold and impersonal to send an email with a resume attachment or URL with only whatever few words are necessary to keep your email client from popping up a warning questioning whether you really want to send an empty email.

* Because it generally goes to /dev/null. Possibly literally.

* Because the time you need to get a cover letter ready and uploaded, the fucking session has expired and you need to restart the whole fucking process. Again.

I do write and send cover letters, and I hate all the online application systems with all my heart. It's awfully time consuming, nerve consuming (those web forms always suck donkey balls, the required fields are cryptic, and you need to re-type in a gazillion fields what you have already typeset in the CV you'll be required to attach anyway) and you (well, I) never get any answer past the automatic acknowledgement that I sent an application.

I am fine with any requirements for the interview process as long as they are clearly defined.

On the applying side, I choose only 5 companies last time and wrote very strong cover letters. Got a call from all of them. HUGE time saver when job searching, be picky with who you apply to and craft a good cover letter.

For the last two jobs I got by actually actively seeking out an opening rather than being contacted by a recruiter, I only send out 2-3 applications each, but with a cover email that was custom to each company.

On one occasion I had a 100% interview rate, on the second one a 66% one (1 out of the three companies had an automated screening system and I'm pretty sure I was too expensive for them).

Whatever experience you have, it won't get you through the door if you give less than a single sentence as a cover letter.

Whatever cover letter you have, it won't get you through the door if you have no experience in your resume.

Have some experiences + have a few sentences cover letter. That's the magic recipe. If you have any less than that, you're going with a disadvantage.

Thus, if I just put up a code/app demo site I am not matching up to what I should be solving for the startup, that is app and in-app conversions. Thus, in my case I have buckled down in some 100 hour weeks to produce some UX app demos that are somewhat lite full apps that show how I would solve the app and in-app conversions issues through UX design.

Once I have the intro conversation established with that I can than point out that its actual working code and talk about the code architecture.

So at the end of Nov when I post the UX demos of videos,screenshots,etc I know that I will see a huge upswing in both visits to my stuff and some full qualified leads opposed to my meager non-effective approach that I tried in previous months.