Writing a Successful Cover Letter

Every day, recruiters and hiring managers sift through volumes of cover letters and resumes to find a handful of potential candidates. Recruiters simply don't have the time to thoroughly read all the resumes. This means you only have one chance to grab someone's attention. This means you need to learn to be skilled at writing successful cover letters.

Successful Cover Letters

So what is a successful cover letter? How do you go about writing one? A good cover letter produces results. Your cover letter and resume should work together to increase your chances of getting an interview.

If you're applying to the right jobs you are qualified for and not getting a call back, then either your resume or your cover letter is not telling the right story. Since recruiters, hiring mangers, and human resources personnel are all short on time. A candidate needs to help them by quickly identifying yourself as the most qualified candidate. The first thing that most of these individuals look at is your cover letter.

Elements of a Successful Cover Letter

Unfortunately many job applicants spend a lot of time writing their resumes and literally slap together a cover letter. A big mistake. When writing a cover letter you need to carefully organize the information using the same care you did when you wrote your resume.

A successful cover letter needs to follow a prescribed format or formula. Our formula for writing successful cover letters consists of four elements:

1. Introduction
2. Objective
3. Achievements
4. Closing

Introduction

An introductory paragraph is the single most important part of your cover letter. It needs to be fact-filled overview of your skills and achievements that appear in your resume.

Objective Statement

Next is something that is fairly simple, but often missed when writing a cover letter. You're
going to tell the reader why you're sending them your resume, your objective statement. An objective statement is a summary of the job opportunities that you want to

Achievements

The next paragraph of your cover letter will contain an excerpt of your career achievements that are pulled directly from your resume. Pulling vital information from your resume you're going to save the reader time. If they are not interested in reading your resume after looking at the achievements appearing on your cover letter, then it's probably just not meant to be.

Closing Statements

Finish your cover letter with a straightforward statement of your optimism - a closing statement. You're going to tell the reader that you're interested in discussing how you can add value to their company by becoming an employee.

Final Tips

You've got a lot of ground to cover with this letter. Even if you have hundreds of reasons why you are the most qualified job candidate and have dozens of great examples, keep you cover letter to just one page. In fact, challenge yourself when writing your cover letter to keep it as short as possible.

One way to keep your cover letter short is to keep on re-reading the document until you're satisfied that all of the unnecessary details have been purged from the cover letter. Once that's done, then you probably have the narrowed things down to the truly essential information.

Have fun and enjoy the experience. Look at writing the cover letter as a necessity and an opportunity. After all, how often do we get a chance to our story, to tell someone how good we really are!

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