Cover letters are to the resume what “hello” is to the interview….
read it here: http://www.realworldjobhunting.blogspot.com

Steve, if your cover letters were more fluff than substance, perhaps that’s because you didn’t have a lot of substance to sell. Just a theory.The cover letter is NOT dead.What should be dead is the attitude of the apparently psychic yet deluded Ms. Paulton - you cannot, in fact, deduce everything you ought to know about a person from a resume, and if you don’t have the attention span necessary to peruse an actual letter meant to communicate and connect with you, you’re in the wrong line of work. Poor U.S. Foodservice. I wonder what the “churn” rate is there? (It’s a recruiter term for the amount of turnover due to poor hiring decisions, unhappy workers, poor management, etc.) If Paulton’s attitude is a reflection of the general culture of her company, we’re all better off NOT working there.

Yes, the cover is dead for the majority (who are applying for jobs through agencies or online). However, the information conveyed is typically still conveyed, albeit through the agent, acting as an advocate on their behalf. Much of the information he or she gathers about you is through you’re personal interaction with them on the phone or in their office, or even through email. Today candidates are no longer strangers to the company before they apply.

Doug - lest you mention if a firm receives 17,000 applications for one position, you’d be lucky enough to get that far. 99% of the time with most large corporations, your chances are 1000 times greater if you’re:

1) Non-white
2) Know the right person in the company

All others, go to the end of the line.

Doug and Bert, are you still carrying clubs and wearing animal skins?

Online applications have not killed the cover letter, but they have killed the abililty to tell if an applicant is white or not and oftentimes even if they are male or female due to gender-neutral names!

p.s. Doug, “through you are personal interaction” makes no sense. Perhaps “through YOUR personal interaction”. If that mistake were to show up in your cover letter, you’d probably be weeded out of the process fairly quickly. Just a theory.

What is required for a cover-letter to be sent via a Company’s website through their e-mail is to make the cover-letter the first page of your resume. Never omit a cover letter. I suggested this to my daughter who was attempting to figure out how to submit a cover via e-mail on a company’s web site. It worked very well for her.

D. Walker, you are spot on.

I wrote that exact same advice a while back on http://www.realworldjobhunting.blogspot.com

As a former recruiter, I’ve found there’s a lot of BAD advice out there for jobseekers, and a lot of outdated ideas, but using a cover letter is not bad advice and is certainly not outdated.

Good luck to your daughter.

I read your article as well as the comments submitted on StLtoday. I would tend to agree that the cover letter (and direct human interaction in general) is generally on the decline in the process of finding a job, however I don’t believe it will actually disappear.

Human interaction is a necessary component of successful hiring. Corporations that insist on using computer generated analysis of candidates will inevitably end up with people who superficially look good on paper, but are hollow inside. They’re the ones who face “churn.”

Most likely the role of the cover letter will change. The media with which it is communicated and transmitted has already changed from the physical letter with letterhead and envelope to an electronic document. Its form and content will most likely change in response to the changing media.

Somehow I think there is fundamentally a place for narrative, sentences, and paragraphs. In general a resume is basically a list. While a resume may have sentence fragments or even whole sentences, it isn’t a narrative in the sense of written communication. This mode of communication is a basic fundamental skill many jobs require. Some jobs require a very high level of skill and ability communicating complex and subtle issues through the use of logical narrative. A cover letter (or some variant of it) will likely be useful in measuring at least initially an applicant’s ability to write.

Today highly technical roles are not hired through human resources directly. They have agencies do the screening for them. Applicants build rapport with recruiters (and then account managers) through a series of interactions. There are never 17000 applicants for these types of jobs (maybe 30 tops) because there are very few qualified individuals available. Companies, who are already making plans for growing their business by exploiting these highly sought after skills don’t care about a few typos. Also recruiters don’t even read the cover letters. Resumes submitted online go into a database and are indexed for searching. Anything of “letter” form will likely be parsed off when they are converted into structured data (the parsers look for company, period, keywords/bulleted items, education, etc.).

However, if your skills are commodity then you should definitely resort to every trick in the book to distinguish yourself(cover letters, thank-you letters, maybe even some cash under the table j/k). The best trick for kids out of college is to call HR and ask questions about opportunities that only hiring managers could answer. HR will have someone call you to answer them (that is pretty standard policy across the board).

I’m not saying the cover letter is a complete waste of time, I’m just saying you’d be better off spending that energy on more productive actions (such as networking, as others have pointed out).

@Andrew, I would think a college degree should filter off applicants who can’t write.

@Civil Discourse - thank you for proofing my entries Your awesome!