Why Your Cover Letter Should be Bold and Daring

Your cover letter and resume are the keys to the door. These documents serve as your first writing sample and an introduction but they also serve another purpose. You are creating an advertisement for yourself.

Advertising needs to be attention grabbing and advertising is targeted. Knowing that your cover letter and resume will not get you an interview at every single job you apply to is very important knowledge. Your cover letter may not reach everyone but if you write a safe, boring, traditional letter it is likely that you'll never reach anyone.

You should go into your letter OK with the fact that no one gets every job they apply to. This will allow you to write more effective letters, letters that get you jobs that are a good fit. You want your cover letter to elicit a reaction from the reader. It needs to be attention grabbing. Think of the first few lines as a headline, if they're not good, the person won't even read the rest. It should be something eye-catching or something memorable. It should not be: Hi I'm writing to submit my resume for your consideration... why else would you write a cover letter?

On a further note, definitely don't talk about how much you want the job. You wouldn't be writing the letter if you didn't want the job. You have to think about how you can differentiate yourself from other applicants without doing something crazy like sending a letter written on a football. When it comes down to it the main thing is that you need a good opener, one that's attention getting and one that's not necessarily safe. If you turn off 60% of the people who read it and turn on 40%, you've still done a much better job than the typical resume sender who receives one response for every 10 or so resumes they send out. After you have their attention, its important to get your message across while their attention is focused. Its important to get to the point quickly and to avoid flowery writing and fillers. Human resources departments have tons of resumes to read, you want to be able to quickly paint a picture of yourself in their minds (**bullet points are useful if used in moderation).

Finally, the resume and cover letter should be an enticing ad for yourself, not a complete biography (save this for the interview). Typically, you win a job in an interview but you'll never get to that point if you lose it right off the bat with your cover letter.

Tip: Don't use an Internet template. They're great for learning how to write a cover letter if you've never seen one before but it should go without saying that you should write your own letters. Ideally the cover letter should be as representative of yourself as possible, not representative of the template you stole from the Internet. Your writing style helps people to learn about you. You want to be a leader not a follower, don't start as a follower by copying your cover letter. Write in a way that allows you to attract the attention of people who share your frame of mind. If you mold your cover letter to be something you're not, chances are you'll end up working for a place that's not like you and inevitably you won't be in a job that you enjoy. After all, that's what we're after isn't it?