I am curious – do you also usually look more for technology-focused experience rather than a more general view of what the candidate's skills look like?

In my view, hiring manager that ignore cover letters usually also have very strong go/no-go criteria like “We won't hire anyone who doesn't have prior Java experience”, etc.

[As a candidate, I like filtering out such employers; so I'm wondering if I should play with including some kind of tracking link in my cover letter that would track if the employer had clicked on it; and filter out employers that didn't.]