Why is this important beyond making the company feel loved?
As a job applicant I’m not going to invest a minute in your company until you’ve read my resume and expressed an interest.
Theres hundreds of companies out there employing who want your time but give nothing back.
I know next thing you'll ask for is a coding test and I’m not doing it. You can blame all the previous companies who wanted a coding test and it turned out to be just burning my time.
No cover letters, no coding tests, no 5 stage interview processes, no “you passed 4 interviews and failed the 5th cause everyone has veto”.
For all other scenarios, cover letters seem pointless and redundant at best, and “i wanna see how much you are willing to suck up to the company” at worst.
I’m not going to write a cover letter about how good of a fit I am for your job if you don’t give me enough information to understand what your job is. Most job descriptions are 90% useless. What I need to know is, what is the problem you need me to solve, and what resources will I have to solve it. If you as a recruiter do not know that, you’re not the right person to write a job description.
If you received a notice that your resume had been read, they liked it, and they wanted a cover letter before an interview, would you submit one?
No, because that would mean they didn’t specify that the cover letter would be required ahead of time, and I am not trying to waste my time.
How am I so certain that they didn’t specify it ahead of time? Because I wouldn’t apply in the first place if a cover letter was listed as a requirement on the initial application.
If I am feeling particularly petty or upset about that surprise ask for a cover letter later in the process, I will just ask ChatGPT to write the most generic and useless cover letter for me, and then send it over.
The result is a quickly scannable, pretty direct and memorable cover letter.
So we aren't looking for a love letter, ideally it'll at least demonstrate that you've read our job listing.
Because at this point I'm pretty sure that 90%+ of the applications we are getting haven't even looked at the job ad, they are just spamming their resume to everything.
I was rejected because it did not pass a case I was not given and could not test against.
I hate the interview process for software engineering
No, and that is exactly the wrong sort of cover letter. A cover letter is a letter from the human applicant to the human hiring manager explaining why he feels that he is a good fit for the position. ‘But that’s the resumé!’ you might say. No, a resume is a list of relevant training, skills and previous employment. Although not traditionally machine-readable, a resumé is basically input into a process machine (we want someone who has been programming in Java for twenty years; this candidate has done it for 24; awesome). The cover letter is input to humans.
Humans whom you will potentially be working with, potentially for years. It seems reasonable for them to get an idea of your communication skills and empathy. Exercise that empathy: put your self in their shoes, and imagine what it is like to receive hundreds of resumés. What would you want to receive from a candidate? What would make your hiring decision easier or harder? Having figured that out, communicate it.
> As a job applicant I’m not going to invest a minute in your company until you’ve read my resume and expressed an interest.
It’s a free world. You don’t owe hiring companies anything. Of course, they don’t owe you anything, either. In a booming hiring market, you may find that you can easily find positions without investing in leads; in a softer market, you may find less success.
I find the concept of cover letter completely disassociated of a candidate competency to do their job.
I can spend 1h to write a cover letter with perfect structure, good intention and really speaking my vision of me in the company, this won't show that I can do a leetcode medium or that my clipper code is well structured.
The resume/CV tells you the "what", the cover letter tells you the "why". Basically, the cover letter is the sales pitch.
If you don't provide one, that certainly doesn't eliminate you from consideration, but providing one can give an important edge.
Even with the AI helping, it's more work than I usually want to do for something that is probably going to be ignored.
Jk but why not ask for a five minute coding challenge instead of a cover letter. Eg decode this string and include it in the subject line.
Sure, being fluent at the level of fizz-buzz in a relevant programming language is useful too - but honestly, that bar is lower.
I realize that people that can't code their way out of a wet paper bag (mysteriously) apply for programming jobs, and there's a low-pass filter needed for that as well - but a coding challenge isn't a substitute to check for (written) communication skills and basic reasoning.
There's "can't" and there's "won't." Programmers in demand won't spend the time, which leaves you with programmers who are desperate enough for work to jump through your hoops (unless you're FAANG or a unicorn). You're effectively filtering your candidate pool down to people you don't want to hire. Round and round we go.
At some point the candidate needs to invest some time on communication with the specific employer - why waste everyone's time synchronously in first first interview, when it's better for both to waste that time asynchronously?
So, who applies to your open position? Programmers who don't have any other options and are desperate for a job. They probably won't pass your interview. You now have a sales funnel that is filtering out the candidates you want and only giving you the ones you don't want. Then you get to be yet another company that complains about how hard it is to find competent programmers.
The exception to all of the above is if you're one of the companies everybody wants to work at. Then you can require whatever you want and people will still apply.
I'm not sure if I understand - there are candidates that want the position, but won't write a couple of (relevant) paragraphs? Surely then they don't have time to interview, negotiate compensation either?
If it's just an open-ended "cover letter"? Then yes.
> Surely then they don't have time to interview, negotiate compensation either?
They have time for substantive stuff, not nonsense.
It sounds like you want to filter only for candidates who may or may not be particularly competent, but who are somewhat obsequious, at least during the hiring process. Maybe that works for your business.
> The programmers a company wants to hire have options that don't require a cover letter.
Ok. That sounds like they expect to be recuited - not needing to apply for a job?
Is there a small group of candidates that will read a job ad, be qualified, want the job enough to apply - but only willing to customize the email address they send their resume to?
Or are we talking about completely separate candidate pools here? Ones that read and respond to ads, and those that expect to be recruited?
> If it's just an open-ended "cover letter"? Then yes.
> They have time for substantive stuff, not nonsense
But it's not nonsense? It's a job application?
Or does "cover letter" strongly imply "fawning, vapid, nonsense" to you?
What is the alternative? Having the first interview as first contact certainly seems like a waste of time?
(Not to mention writing skills being essential for remote work - which I hope is an option for most software positions these days)
I think basically yes.
You raise a good point, though, about people who are really good just always getting recruited. Based on my small sample size, such people do still apply to jobs at startups they find interesting. So their pipeline is thus a mix of cold apps and recruiter activity and referrals.
> But it's not nonsense? It's a job application?
No, it's nonsense. A "cover letter" is a terrible prompt to elicit any meaningful information about a candidate, and implies negative things about the company asking for one. Among them: that the company is perfectly willing to have the candidate waste their own time writing one, so this symmetry of investment and time-saving rationale doesn't seem too convincing, IMO.
I think if you want to assess writing skills, you should ask more focused questions, such as "What is the biggest thing you have built in x language", "What is your experience with y"
You will still filter out good candidates who do not want or do not have time to answer any such questions, but I think those questions are far more fair and probative of the kinds of qualitative skills you are looking for than "write me a thing to tell me how much you want this job"
On the contrary, a cover letter is a powerful tool to elicit meaningful information about a candidate’s soft skills, in particular empathy (for the hiring manager) and communication, and refusal to provide one implies negative things about a candidate.
> I think if you want to assess writing skills, you should ask more focused questions, such as "What is the biggest thing you have built in x language", "What is your experience with y"
A good candidate does not need those prompts. Having read the job description, he has an idea of what the hiring manager wants, and he writes about it.
> "write me a thing to tell me how much you want this job"
That’s not a cover letter. I don’t care how much a candidate wants a job. To be honest, neediness is a turn off. I care how effective the candidate will be at the job, both technically and socially.
I feel that perhaps you and others think all a cover letter is, is ‘Company X is such a great place! I want to work at Company X so much! Please pick me!’ If so, then yeah, I 100% agree with you. That’s useless input to the hiring process. But that’s not what a cover letter is IMHO.
As mentioned elsewhere, I assert that a cover letter is the soft skills equivalent to the resumé. The resumé lists relevant skills, education/training and experience. Those are all good things, but they are in the nature of checking boxes. The cover letter is a soft-skills demonstration. It’s also an opportunity for a candidate who is borderline in one area to draw attention to the fact that he more than makes up for it in another.
Not anymore. Not with ChatGPT. In any case, you have completely missed my point, right along with e12e.
> Not anymore. Not with ChatGPT.
I don’t think so. I don’t care if a writer uses spell check, grammar check or ChatGPT: good cover letter is a good cover letter, regardless of what tools the writer used to help.
> In any case, you have completely missed my point, right along with e12e.
What was it, then? That the best candidates consider cover letters nonsense? I disagree: I am asserting that a candidate who considers cover letters nonsense is ipso facto not among the best.
Maybe this is related to a misunderstanding about cover letters? They’re not about ‘I love your company!’ or ‘please please hire me!’; they are about ‘here’s why I believe that my skills, education and prior experience suit me for this opportunity.’ The resumé is what; the cover letter is why. The resumé is facts; the cover letter is judgement.
It's not about can or cannot, it is about need and need not; you are by and large getting applications only from people who really need to apply to jobs even when there are these kinds of hurdles.
Because if it's not asking for a cover letter, you as an applicant are one of 160 low-effort resumes we've gotten this week. Do we build a ML to try to parse all these and then ask it to score everything? Because I hear a lot of people in this thread saying that's exactly what they hate about hiring.
That’s not an argument, it’s an ageist ad hominem.
> why not ask for a five minute coding challenge instead of a cover letter
Why not both? There are two aspects to any hire: hard skills and soft skills. The hard skills are the things a resumé can relate and a coding challenge can demonstrate. But we do not hire automata (if we did, we might as well just use ChatGPT or Copilot); we hire human beings who will be working in teams with others, who will need to take input from other human beings and interpret it, try to figure out what is being unsaid but which should be said & so forth. Those soft skills are the hardest part of the job to hire for, and in many ways the hardest to develop.
The cover letter is a the equivalent of a five minute coding challenge for soft skills. ‘Put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes. What would he like to read which make you stand out from the other candidates?’
Or a human could just read the resume.
In our case, we have 3 out of 10 people at the company reviewing these resumes (CTO, senior sysadmin, full-stack dev). We are committing significant resources to reviewing applications.
If you are going to optimize for submitting to a machine that scores your application, don't be surprised that a human isn't reading your application.
Here's the thing: If you're willing to accept that your resume will be passed over in preference for people who wrote a cover letter, that's fine, but a curious position to be in if you are looking for a job...
You're self selecting for people who happen to be as privileged as you are. Maybe that's what you want, but I'm not surprised it's been more difficult than you were expecting.
Please note, I'm not disputing your comment at all. It's just that what used to be considered the norm (cover letter, etc) is just way too time-intensive by the wayside as applicants now have to mostly optimize for quantity of apps submitted.
If you don't NEED a new job ASAP then, yeah, you can do that, but for someone who's been laid off or unemployed for longer stretches, it's really just a numbers game most of the time.
It’s absolute bullshit. What precisely do you mean?
Many smart people choose the right path even when they are broke and hopeless, it makes no sense to shift responsibility and call it privilege.
Doing this is a good way to get people good enough to have options to avoid applying to your job posting.
Yea, sure, cover letter for some JoeSoft writing crud apps may be weird
but for fancier jobs I don't really see problem with cover letters where candidate can share something more human than CV's "i've did blabla" like passion, motivation, etc, etc.
And highly motivated employee may be way more valuable than more skilled employee
Is there any evidence that writing a cover letter means they will be a motivated employee? What motivates me is the problem that I am solving on the job. I am extremely motivated to solve that specific task. If you ask me to write a cover letter about myself, I have zero motivation to do that because the evaluation criteria are unclear and half the companies don’t read them to begin with.
When I’m evaluating candidates, the only useful thing about a cover letter is as a disqualifying factor. If I see they’re bad at writing, I’ll likely reject their resume as well. Being well-spoken isn’t a positive, though.
They're at least motivated enough to spend time writing a cover letter.
FWIW, I haven't written a cover letter since 1997, but if it was a company I was interested in, I would write one if I thought they would read it.
Also, consider some smart people haven't acquired the ability of talking on their feet yet, but might be able to show some desirability when given the chance to write. Thomas Jefferson was that way; he wrote beautifully but speeches, not so much.
I meant evaluating this by reading the content.
Why would anybody want to do that? This is actually a serious question. Why would you expect Java developers to want to write frontend JavaScript code? I have seen a lot of positions come up like this and the employer is always left cluelessly scratching their heads as to why hiring is so hard. Is this a problem of expectation management or poor empathy?
This could be why that employer is not happy with the quality of candidates. They are forcefully imposing Java with an iron fist and wondering why people aren’t thrilled to work fullstack like that, when most people are not thrilled to work fullstack like that.
That is because there are smart people in the world that can self educate and jump into new technology with minimal friction, but those people are rare. Most employers want employees as early as the position opens and they don’t want to invest in training. Java is super desirable to employers because many developers are taught Java in school, it’s single paradigm, and it’s terse OOP conventions force the vague shape of a uniform architectural style. Most developers only know enough to be hired and not enough to write original software, of any style, so employers have to account for these things as though everyone is a junior developer, least common denominator.
That line of thinking suggests lower expenses, ease of candidate selection, and a wider candidate pool. In reality it tends to result in a less qualified larger labor pool with greater insecurity. This is why everything on the JavaScript side is about giant frameworks and the software is super bloated, because putting text to screen is all that matters but nobody knows how the technology works without a framework.
It seems like that they are having trouble finding people because what they want is less than optimal.
Why not get people who’ve worked with Java and other frontend frameworks, or Vue and other object oriented languages? In my first coding role I knew absolutely no C#, just some JS but I was contributing to the codebase within a week. Most of the particulars of your codebase will be particular to your codebase. Find people who’ve shown they can learn and give them a few weeks rather than take months to hire a person who has last worked with your particular stack.
Is a cover letter or a resume going to allow a manager the best chance at making a good hiring decision, WRT to finding a good fit for the project and team?
Clearly, you'll need more than just one or both of those, but as a first step, I'll take a cover letter that shows you give a damn over a fire and forget resume . If your only interaction with hiring is: "I'm willing to put in nothing more than the bare minimum", that's telling me something.
After spending a couple days of 2-3 hours each on reviewing resumes that were "only ok", we started adding additional hoops for getting resumes in, and also tried to put in a gatekeeper to really urge applicants to write cover letters. After that the rate has dropped to bearable, but we still maybe get one out of 10 applications with a cover.
So, if you are applying to a job right now, I'd say that rather than optimizing your process for getting a lot of jobs applied for, spend some more time and apply for jobs that you're well suited for, and then make a cover letter that explains why.
I've been very lucky, I've not had to apply for many jobs. But when I have, I always wrote a specific cover letter AND customized my resume to the job advert.
But, yeah, we're having a hard time finding full-stack people that can hit the ground running with Java and Vue.