The Life and Death of the Perfect Cover Letter
What really happens when you hit send?
I just wrote the perfect cover letter, one that defines exactly what I’m looking for, all while carefully crafting the journey that brought me to this exact point in life. It’s the perfect ratio of whitespace to text, the right balance of professional history, company knowledge, and personability.
As I pause to convert it over into the PDF file that I’ll collate with my umpteenth CV update, I’m hopeful. It’s here where a cover letter truly lives and breathes before being sent into the incinerator.
In light of this, I sit up, place the laptop on the coffee table and decide to give it a proper life and read it aloud. At least the odd apartment complex maintenance tech or the neighbor who’s trapped in the throes of an equally purgatorial post-grad job search will have a taste of its brilliance.
Truthfully, the cover letter is possibly never meant to see the light of day. As my job search marches on, I’ve thumbed through enough self-help guides and job tutorials to know that these things are rarely read.
At best they’re skimmed.
As a writer, I suppose we should be thick-skinned and accustomed to our work never seeing the light of day. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who once shared…
