The article is right. The cover letter gives you a chance to jump out from the resume format and do some marketing for yourself. I accidentally did A/B testing on my cover letter a few years back. I wasnt getting much response with a dry cover letter, so I rewrote it with a more informal upbeat tone adding humor and even threw in snippets of song lyrics (I kid you not). Immediately the response doubled. One thing it did was engage the front line screeners and HR types. If you dont get by them you dont get anywhere. It also gave me a personality that people could remember.

I couldn't agree more.

Presenting your personality is precisely why I carefully write a friendly, intriguing and upbeat cover letter for each and every job.

You can't present a culture fit better than by presenting your personality.

I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has now been my wife for over five years.

That says more about me, outside of my skill set and experience, than my CV ever could and works wonders for making me stand out, as well as intriguing whoever may be reading my application.

"I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has now been my wife for over five years."

That is the best thing I have heard in a long time. I can't stop laughing.

I've hired a couple of people recently, and personally I use cover letters to see how people write.

Not every hiring manager cares about this, but I will not hire somebody who can't write half a page of text without making egregious spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. I've seen cover letters that, when opened in Word, become a sea of red and green squiggles. It demonstrates a total lack of attention to detail, among other unflattering characteristics.

Sadly, I rule out a LOT of applicants this way.

Cover letters are often used to weed people out, so it's not always a good idea to create one. IMO, if you have a great cover letter include it, but if average or below skip it.

That is the point of the article. A good cover letter will do more for you than a resume alone. If you aren't getting cover letters that means candidates will benefit from writing one.

If some specific company's hiring process isn't set up to extract useful info from a cover letter, though, the value will be muted at best.

It can never hurt. If there's a company where the opinion and feelings of the person reading the resumes doesn't count for anything then I don't want to work there anyway.

A cover letter can be more than just why you want the job.

Really, just demonstrating that you've taken the time to read our website and try to understand what we do scores you a few points in my book. It's one thing to say you're "detail oriented," but quite another to actually demonstrate it by paying attenting to details.

You might get that if you worked at some place I wanted to work more than the average place, but for the average firm, why bother?

If you don't want to spend 5 or 10 minutes writing a cover letter for the job, why are you bothering to apply at all? And why should anyone bother to spend the 5 minutes to read your resume?