Forget the resume, kill on the cover letter

Re:Forget the resume, kill on the cover letter by kscaldef on Monday June 01, 2009 @05:37PM (#636849)

I always tailor my cover letters to each company. On the other hand, I'm not shotgunning out 100s of resumes.

But, my experience on the other side of the table is that I've never actually gotten a cover letter passed on from HR. Or, if HR gave them to the hiring managers, they didn't pass them on to the engineers reviewing resumes & doing interviews.

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Re:Forget the resume, kill on the cover letter by iigs on Monday June 01, 2009 @09:52PM (#637204)

I've done a fair amount of job interviews and cover letters are always stripped by our (internal) recruiters. When external recruiters are involved it looks like they do $ cat resume.doc | strings | mail [email protected].

Maybe there's a strategy here:

Cover letter: I love frat-houses and beer! I want to bring my spiky hair to work for you!

Resume: When I'm not submitting patches to the RoR team I'm writing Scala code for my EC2 cluster.

It's a shame the economy is so bad. It would be fun to do some exploratory job hunting to see if this strategy would work.

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