Guest Author - Kristen Welcome

During the past two weeks, I’ve covered the way to properly address your cover letter and make it look as professional as possible, and how to hook the attention of a hiring manager with a catchy and substantive opening paragraph. In this week’s installment of the Cover Letter Workshop, we take a look at the body of the cover letter, and the ways that it can be used to advertise your best qualities before a hiring manager has even laid eyes on your resume.

You may be asking yourself why it is important to include many details about your talents and best qualities in your cover letter. After all, aren’t these details already laid out in your resume?

Usually they are. However, no matter how creatively you have designed your resume, it will follow a certain formal format that doesn’t allow you as much freedom as a cover letter to inject your personality and your own special flair.

You can think of your cover letter as very detailed response to the potential employer’s job posting. This posting will usually include very specific abilities that the hiring manager will be looking for in the applicants for this position. The body of your cover letter should address all of these points with specific details. This gives you the opportunity to pull out the best and most salable facts from your resume and wave them under the hiring manager’s nose. This increases your chances of landing an interview because the hiring manager will not need to dissect your resume to determine whether you are properly qualified for the position; your letter will make it immediately clear that you are. This is especially helpful if you are changing careers and need to convince a hiring manager that your skills from one career translate well to the applied-for job in a different field. If you prefer, you can even make use of a bulleted list in your cover letter to show off the best traits that a hiring manager should be aware of. Here is an example of a second paragraph from a positive cover letter:

As you can glean from a perusal of the attached resume, I have consistently demonstrated excellence in my performance as an Office Manager, and for this reason I was selected to serve on customer service committees at Superlative Company. I accepted the position of Office Manager after being promoted from my position as Administrative Assistant, where I developed programs and strategies for support staff recruitment, mentoring and performance monitoring where little structure had previously existed. I saved the company approximately $100,000 in recruitment costs by utilizing my own local network rather than outsourcing recruitment functions, and increased company profitability by improving support staff performance. I am keenly interested in directing this expertise toward Prospective Company.

While this applicant’s resume may have demonstrated her skills and experience, the freedom to lay out her work history in this fashion helps to highlight her superior work ethic and also tells her work history in a story-like way, showing how very valuable this applicant was at her last place of employment. How could a hiring manager resist?

Cover letters also provide you with the freedom to explain items from your resume that a hiring manager might find questionable, and put a positive spin on those items before a hiring manager has the chance to begin to form a negative opinion. For instance, if you have gaps in your work history, you can explain these in a positive way so that a hiring manager will have a firm understanding of your reasons before examining your resume, and will be less likely to become skeptical if the reasons have already been set forth in the cover letter.

Although a cover letter serves as a introduction to a resume, it should also be viewed as a substantive part of your job application and the best way to explain unusual items in your resume or to group your skills and experiences together in a creative way to demonstrate that your are especially qualified for a position. In our next and final installment of the Cover Letter Workshop, we will review the best ways to close a cover letter and how to follow up after a resume and cover letter have been submitted to a potential employer.



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