I put this in IMHO because I have a feeling that there may be no for sure “right” answer to it. It still may belong in GQ though, if so, my bad.
My question, is how should I handle a cover letter when emailing out my resume? Is the actual email considered the cover letter, or should I type one up in word or something?
If the email is really considered the cover letter as well, how should I format it? Should I type it out exactly like a real letter would be, or should I be brief like an email?
If I should include a seperate cover letter as an attachment, what should I include in the email? Again, should I write the email formally, or should I just be brief or what?
I’ve gotten a lot of great advise on writing my resume here, so hopefully I can get some suggestions on this aspect of it as well. Thanks a lot for your help.
In my opinion, the email itself is the cover letter. I suggest formatting it just as you would a typed letter. However, you might want to consider making the email version a bit more concise.
Attach the resume to your email in either plain text(to ensure that anyone can open the document), or in whatever word processing application they have.
Make sure to to explain why you are a good fit for the position, address any relevant weakness you might have, illustrate how you can save the company money, while at the same time increasing their revenue.
I always write out the email just as I would a cover letter. Obviously, the email message is what your prospective employer will see first, and also you don’t want to clog up his/her mailbox with a lot of attachments.
As for how to write it, use the same content as you would with a cover letter, but not the format (inside address and all that stuff). Now, I’d love to hear everyone else’s take on this, but personally I prefer getting text-only email, no HTML or RTF. So try to keep fnacy formatting to a bare minimum.
I don’t know about other employers, but I’ve never once read a cover letter in my life. And I’ve hired hundreds of people. But maybe that’s just me. Personally, I would use the email as the cover letter.
In general, it’s the cover letter that gets you the interview, since it tells more about the candidate than any resume ever does. The trick is to write a good one; few do.
Yes, the e-mail should be considered the cover letter. It serves the same purpose – making a good first impression. I wouldn’t worry about formatting.
I usually put a very brief (i.e. one short paragraph) summary of education and experience in the email. I usually attach the full cover letter and CV as a single Word document so that the recipient doesn’t have to save or print separate documents.
Now-a-days, the process goes like this:
a) you send your resume (and maybe cover letter) in to a company.
b) the company’s HR dept throws away the cover letter and scans the resume into their database
c) the hiring manager searches on key words, pulling up relevant resumes.
The person who makes the hire rarely if ever sees the cover letter. In my case, when I do see one, I toss it. If an employer gets a resume from a headhunter, they never bother to include a cover letter.
I’ve read over a thousand resumes in the past few years and hired a few hundred people. I don’t have time to read cover letters (or silly sections like ‘Hobbies’, but that’s another story). I suspect I speak for most employers here.
Mind you, it’s not bad to include a cover letter, in fact I’d recommend that you do so. But you can bet that isn’t what’ll get you in for an interview.
I have to agree with Bill H about cover letters not being very important anymore, although that might not apply depending on the industry. In both my current and previous jobs (management consulting and finance), the only thing we looked for in the cover letter (and I’ve probably received at least 5,000 in the past 5 years) was typos or psychos, because then those people were automatically trashed. Other than that, we progressed further in the selection process based solely on where the applicants got their B.A./B.S., which B school they went to, any further advanced degrees, GPA, GMAT/GRE scores, and their previous relevant work experience. They could have had the most fabulous letter in the history of cover letters and we didn’t care - all that mattered was whether they met our cut-off criteria. We didn’t even keep the letters beyond the first weed-through.
BUT - you should still write some kind of a cover letter; sending a resume alone is kind of abrupt, and you should provide at least a brief introduction to yourself, but in my opionion and experience the cover letter is no longer what gets you the interview or the job. (But it can certainly exclude you from even having a chance at an interview; see above.)
Each company is different and all that. Make sure you put in some kind of covering statement on the email. You may catch some people’s eye with it.
I would also paste the resume into the email text as well as attaching as a seperate file. You never know when someone might quickly scan an email as opposed to actually having to open a seperate file.
It certainly depends on the industry. HR at the places I’ve worked for would send the cover letter as part of the entire package to the person doing the hiring. If you work with the public at all, it’s important for the person doing the hiring to know something more than what is put on a resume. A resume tells you useful information, but not what you really want to know about an employee (if it did, why bother with an interview?).
In a highly technical field, HR might believe that a resume is all that is needed (but it’s not – see my previous parenthetical aside). Since hiring is a crapshoot anyway, it might even look like it’s working. But they are also passing up people who may be better than the people they eventually hire. (What’s the best predictor of how good an employee will be in a job? Not the resume. Not the experience. It’s how much he wants the job.)
Still, rant aside, if you’re in a technical field, than the cover letter may not be essential. But in fields where working with others is important, the cover letter is important, too. It tells the employer of the intangibles that don’t show up on the resume, and all employers hire on intangibles. And it’s especially important if you’re applying to a small company that may not even have a formal HR department.
I would agree that it depends on where you’re applying and in what field.
For example, I’ve hired young law students for articles. Since the law tends to be a formal type of discipline, as opposed to the dot.com industries (what - there aren’t any of those any more?), the hiring committee (all lawyers, no HR people, thank heavens) looks at everything that the applicant has drafted - an e-mail, the covering letter, the résumé. No cover letter, just an e-mail, strikes me as a bit odd. If a person doesn’t present well in all of the written materials, that counts against him/her for getting an interview.
(And I really dislike the “strategic plan” kind of résumés - but that’s cuz I really dislike strategic goofing generally. As far as I can tell, all it does is contribute to bad writing styles.)
Based on my hiring experience, fleshing out the email as a form of cover letter is a good idea as long as it’s done carefully and correctly. If it contains actual content we usually retain it with the resume and app.
My advice? Use it as a variation of the traditional cover letter–many of which are generic word-factory exercises in triteness, btw. It’s cool to exploit the possibilities to express your interest and do it concisely. May just be my impression but it’s more polished than “crank another one off the line” naked emails.
But fercryinoudloud make SURE it’s correct in all parts. Typos, spelling goofs, grammatical errors, etc. are more visible–and annoying–than flickering neon.
