10 of the Best Sample Cover Letters and the Cover Letter Tips to Get A Job

There’s nothing worse than a boring cover letter. Okay, actually, there are a few things worse. You could spell the name of the company you’re applying to wrong, or just insult them. But, besides that, there’s nothing worse than being BORING. HR professionals read tons of cover letters every day. Believe me, that was once my full-time job. Very few cover letters stand out, and the ones that do are the ones that are interesting. Be interesting.

Note of caution. I say “be interesting”. I don’t say, “be TOO interesting.” There’s a fine line. You need to be professional and sell yourself, but you don’t need to be a comedian.

Since I used to be a teacher, here’s a link to an interesting article on cover letters for teachers: http://www.ethicsandnarrative.com/cover-letter-for-education-jobs

A good reminder from HR Professional Lily Garcia that it pays to be specific in a cover letter. Don’t just say how great you are, but what specifically you can do for the company you’re applying to:

“If you want to get noticed, your goal should be to demonstrate that you understand the operations of the business and how, exactly, you could make a unique contribution to its success. Nothing will impress the firm more than for you to be able to provide coherent and specific ideas for the “objectives” section of your annual appraisal. Challenge yourself to think beyond general concepts. Rather than asserting, for example, that you could leverage your extensive software development and customer relations experience to provide superlative service to the firm’s top clients, discuss a specific technical project of the firm and how, in that particular case, your participation would make a difference for the better.”

The whole article can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020402507.html .

HR professionals have a saying – “Never judge a book by its cover, always judge an applicant by their cover letter.” The bad news is, it’s never fun to be judged. The good news is, it’s easy to create a GREAT cover letter to get you the job you deserve. I know, it doesn’t seem easy, but once you have a winning template down you can use it over and over again to get the jobs you want. That means, take an hour or so to create a great letter, have it proof read, edit the heck out of it, let it sit, and then repeat the process. Do this a few times and you’ll have a good foundation to build from.

Please note, even though I say it’s good to have a cover letter template (which it is) it’s not great if the employer knows it’s a template. In fact, if it’s clear you’re using the same cover letter for every application, you’re bound to stay unemployed for a while.