What Should Your Cover Letter Be About?
Hi friend,
I’ve written a few blogs about cover letters— mainly about why you need them in 2021 and how to get started— but I have yet to cover the hardest part: what should your cover letter be about? Even if you don’t feel confident about writing a cover letter, you probably know repeating your resume in paragraph form is boring. Your cover letter should provide rich context to your experience and skills, helping the hiring manager or recruiter understand how you are different from other people with similar resumes so that you stand out.
It helps to think of your cover letter like a grade school essay. The first paragraph is your thesis about yourself, the middle paragraphs of your cover letter are the supporting evidence, and the last paragraph is your conclusion. Most cover letters have room for two supporting paragraphs; you can include three if you want to, but don’t sacrifice details and specificity to do so. Each paragraph should provide evidence for your statements about yourself in the opening paragraph of your cover letter, and reveal a unique approach or strength of yours.
For example, let’s imagine your I am... statement is:
I am a compassionate team lead and project manager, with over a decade of experience leading cross-functional operations projects in multinational companies.
This suggests that the cover letter’s middle paragraphs should be about people leadership and project management experience. Here, we already have hints about the unique strength or approach of this person— compassion and a particular niche of project management experience. Perhaps the two things tie together: this person has been successful at leading cross-functional projects with distributed teams because of their compassion.
Just like a grade school paper, the supporting paragraphs have their own structure: topic, examples, analysis. Continuing with the above example, the topic sentence of the cover letter’s first paragraph might be:
Over the past two decades, I have led more than sixty colleagues on eleven teams; as a leader, I approach everyone with compassion and openness to learning, which has made me successful in challenging environments.
The next sentence or two should provide examples of this person’s compassion and openness to learning in action making them successful. For example:
In my most recent role with COMPANY A, I was tasked with leading a merger with a company in Argentina, a country we had never worked in before. I knew the language barrier and concerns about layoffs could result in key people leaving before the merger was complete, so I…
After providing some examples (you may only have room for one example, and that’s okay if it’s a strong one!), you need to wrap up your paragraph so it transitions well to the next paragraph of the cover letter and doesn’t end abruptly. If you’re stuck, one technique is to state an opinion you’ve formed based on your experience. Opinions show that you are invested in your career and think critically about your work. For example:
It can be easy to focus on productivity metrics and project tasks, but the ultimate success of my work has always been determined by the strength of my relationships with other people.
That’s it! Is it easy? Not exactly, but now it’s not a mystery. You can do it!
See you next week,
Karissa
