The Economist: Cover letters, why are will still enduring with the mysterious waste of time

Dear Sir/Madam - You asked for a short cover letter to accompany my application to work in your sales department.

I could spend time telling you that your company is the one place I have always wanted to work.

My mother tells me that my very first words were Dassault Systèmes/Sequoia Capital/change as needed.

I have a tattoo of your logo/founder’s face on my lower back. I have named all of my pets after your various product lines. I am grateful just to be given the opportunity to be rejected by you.

But if you do hire me, you won’t just be getting an employee, you’ll be getting a brand evangelist.

Or I could use up precious words exaggerating my experiences and skills.

To pick out just a few, in a previous role I inherited a team with annual revenues of $10 million and quadrupled them in less than three minutes.

I have lived in all of the world’s most important emerging markets, and speak fluent Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish and Portuguese. I can sign in all these languages, too.

I once negotiated a multilateral trade treaty on my own.

In my spare time I like to meditate, kickbox and teach underprivileged children how to read. If I am extremely busy, I do all three of these things at once.

Or I could devote paragraphs to describing my problem-solving credentials.

To do so, I would use the STAR (situation, task, action and result) method that your own website says is a crucial part of your interview process.

To take just one example, I previously worked for a chickpea distributor in Alaska.

A colleague was underperforming badly and I was asked to mentor him. I worked intensively with him, accompanying him on all his client calls until I transformed his numbers and he became the best-performing salesperson in the entire chickpea industry.

As a result, the bastard was promoted to run the department and I find myself looking for work.

Or I could tell you more about my character and values. I am passionate about everything, which some might say shows a complete lack of discrimination. I have a growth mindset: growth means more to me than anything! (That’s a joke, code for showing that I understand that work should be fun, too.)

I am extremely resilient: this is the 435th cover letter that I have sent out in the past month, even though your company is the only place I truly want to work. I am led by the data and have a strong sense of purpose. I am focused on results and believe in the power of kindness. And so on and so forth.

Or I could just use this letter as an excuse to repeat keywords from the job advertisement for this position. In fact, that’s basically all I have been doing so far, with the exception of “chickpea” and “bastard”.

Passionate, problem-solving, purpose? Tick. Tick. Tick. I smuggled “code” in there, too, as a subliminal signal that I might be able to program.

But I could always spend more of my word count on things that you have told me you want. Dynamic. Goal-oriented. Persuasive. Confident. Proven.

Or I could ask what the hell is the point of me writing a cover letter at all?

If the idea is to prove that I am willing to put in extra time, then ChatGPT has reduced the effort of writing a generic cover letter to almost nothing.

You would be better off insisting that all applicants submit a handwritten note and train their own pigeon to deliver it directly to your offices.

Nor are you likely to get a lot of new information out of this letter. I know you have to filter people out somehow. But wouldn’t getting us to do some kind of aptitude or personality test tell you more about my candidacy?

I can make all of the same boasts in the CV you also asked for, and on LinkedIn (where I may be less likely to make things up). I have followed all of the usual advice on cover letters, as has almost every other applicant.

I am playing your own words back to you, as I have already admitted.

I have been careful to use lots of action verbs, like “transformed” and “quadrupled”, to reinforce the impression that I am an entrepreneurial go-getter with a hunter mentality. (Tick. Tick. Tick.)

In other words, this is almost certainly a waste of your time and mine.

The only defensible argument that I can think of for requesting a cover letter is that you might stumble across something a bit different.

You might even come across a candidate honest enough to tell you what they think and memorable enough to warrant an interview.

I look forward to meeting you in person soon.

Yours sincerely, Frank Lee