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Writer's pictureLevi

Don’t ask for a cover letter!

I know, it is kind of standard. That is where a candidate can show personality, and highlight achievements in persuasive writing, to convey to the employer why you’re a great candidate for the role.


But who are you writing the cover letter for? Dear hiring manager? Let’s see who is reading it. (For the sake of simplicity, let’s skip the reality of staffing companies with their interest and pretend a company made up its mind to hire someone full time.) The whole resume may just fail on ATS. End of story. If not, then overworked recruiters may give the hiring manager a candidate resume with a cover letter. They/we scan it — half of the whole job description was marketing and PR material anyways, so not surprisingly the resume and cover letter will state impossible things, like junior with 4 years experience in every depth and breadth of professional experience. Sure, they already invented the wheel, made 4 billion dollars, got into Fortune 50 before the age of 2.


Why not cut all the crap at the JD (Job Description) level? Do the hiring manager, HR, and recruiting job properly! Let’s see: I need someone to do the following:

  • provide a checklist of tasks with measurement (let’s do OKRs in the JD)

  • provide other key measurable values.

Example of other values: be kind:

  • We measure kindness with Bonsuly/Kudos/Nectar (it does not matter which one — it is not an ad for them). And sure hope there will be a solution across companies for the future to measure kindness.

  • Test question in the application form (instead of a cover letter): what would you do if a peer, who is not high on your sympathy list tells you: you don’t know what you are doing. Type your response here.

  • Do not say things like: leave your ego behind. Let me remind you of Freud: ego is part of a person. Technically it cannot be left behind. And will the C-level people like Elon Musk leave it behind as well? And how would you measure it anyway? Should the candidate quietly nod for a stupid task that means the ego was left behind? And this one is just one example

Instead of a cover letter let’s have a list of hiring needs. After every need let’s provide a field to type some relevant experience, that the candidate believes supports that need. We all would save a lot of time and effort for both sides.


Bonus feature: make your ATS reader public and free. Do not ask the candidate to type the resume in your system. Give back the ATS result and let the candidate make corrections if needed, then we can all be much more efficient.

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