Correct. It's also possible that, as a candidate, demonstrating token emotional attachment to a job posting positively correlates with advancing through the candidate funnel.

Your strategy is yours to choose.

Most of the best people I know have very little interest in getting another job. So, I suspect funnels tend to remove the top and bottom.

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.

That company likely has culture issues then? I've never even heard of anything like that before. I've heard people say that their HR doesn't understand them or what they do, but this is taking it to another level.

His theory was this. He like everyone else wants the top 5%. Some of those people graduated from standford and have a clean job history. Those people don't spend much time looking for work. While smaller in number, great people with odd backgrounds are likely to spend longer looking for work. So, if you actually want the best look for them in the rejection pile.

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.

Hah, this sounds like the Moneyball of hiring.

If that is how a given company filters for candidates, then I have desire to advance through their funnel.

This seems like a reasonable deal to me.

Funnels can filter both ways. :)

Filtering is not even the job that funnels do.

You don't need to demonstrate emotional attachment.

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.

You're right! Cover letters are all about demonstrating value. Cover letters are great for copywriters, marketers, and others whose primary output is prose for humans. In such cases, cover letters demonstrate competence for the job at hand.

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!

Cover letters don't need to be paragraph after paragraph of prose, and they don't always go to HR drones either, see for example, the context of this thread because many of the who's hiring posts bypass HR drone screening.

> 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.

What did the cover letter that got you an interview look like? What it something that could not be describes as paragraphs of prose? What you say about it - introducing yourself, showing an understanding of their problems, talking about your value-add - sounds very likely to bear a strong resemblance to paragraphs of prose. Though if you tell me it was a series of limericks, I will be very impressed.

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".

That what the interview is for. This is just a pre filter.