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

The Economist
The Economist
Why are we still bothering with cover letters?
Why are we still bothering with cover letters? Credit: Artwork by William Pearce/The Nightly

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.

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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

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