If you thought resumes were misunderstood, consider the poor cover letter. While most folks will agree that a resume is needed, cover letters are a different story.
In an earlier post on cover letters we looked into whether a cover letter is actually needed, and while I couldn’t find a consensus we could conclude: “Always include a cover letter, if it’s not needed then it will be ignored, if a cover letter was expected and you didn’t include it then it’s likely to count against you.”
It seems most of the reasons why people ignore cover letters is because there are so many poor ones out there.
So how do you make sure your cover letter does as good a job for you as your resume does?
Lets deal with the formatting here.
Most cover letters are in a paragraph format, which is all well and good, but if the reader has a large number of ones to read, all they see is three or four large blocks of text. Take a look at this example.
It doesn’t look unpleasant, but you can see that all the text looks the same, nothing jumps out at you.
1. Bullet Point Cover letter
Choosing a different format will help yourcover letter stand out from the rest and bullet points are a good way to get the reader to quickly see and read the most important points.
When you look at this example cover letter, your eyes are immediately drawn to the bullet points (as will any other reader). The bullet points already have the readers attention and now your words will have an even greater impact.
2. T-Style or Two Column Cover letter
An alternative is to include a two-column or t-style format in the cover letter. Like the bullet points your eyes are drawn to the two columns and the information each column includes.
Take a look at this example:
There’s a number of options for what you would include in the two columns, for example you could make one column “You want” where you would pick out from the job description the top 5 or 6 things, and in the other column “I have” which you would list the skills, experiences qualifications or whatever you have that matches what they’re looking for.
| You Want | I have |
| Choose 5 or 6 skills from the job description | List the skills you have that match their needs here |
Another option is to use one column to describe one type of skills you have e.g. business skills, and the second column lists some of the technical skills you have. These are by no means the only two things you could include in the two column format.
Want to try out the different options then log in to VirtualJobCoach and give it a try, use the preview function to see how they each look.
If you haven’t tried the cover letter creator in VirtualJobCoach, why not? – it’s FREE to create an account.
May 1, 2008 at 3:45 am |
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