Today I had the wonderful experience of writing a cover letter in 5 minutes. The words flowed, the experience came together in a coherent picture of a young man who was ready to take on the world from his potential seat in a high-rise in downtown Calgary. I sold myself by identifying the right idiosyncrasies and painting them as exactly what the company needed. Lately, writing a cover letter has not been so easy.
There is something very disconcerting about not being able to write an effective cover letter about yourself. Human adults spend more of their waking hours working than engaged in any other activity (and for most of us, working surpasses sleep as well), and we define ourselves partially by our work life. So, when try you to sit down and put your good qualities on paper, and you fail, it does not feel good. You try to think of what would make you a good employee, and you come up short. What is happening is that, in essence, you have lost faith in yourself as a worker.
When you write your cover letter despite this feeling, your negativity will show through. For myself, I go through the rigmarole of stating my experience and how it ties into what the employer is looking for. Of course, this is what you are supposed to do, but it ends up looking uninspired. Instead of weaving a narrative about your experience, it ends up reading like a truncated list of unnatural connections between experience and expectations. With more and more companies using the Internet as their primary source of potential candidates, the cover letter is your first line of attack; it's the only place your personality can shine through. An uninspired cover letter doesn't exactly .. ahem.. inspire a positive response. So what happens is a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a lack of response to your jobs undermines the same confidence that you need to write a good cover letter. This is unfortunately the pattern I have been stuck in for a little while. Does anybody else know what this feels like?
Thank goodness then for the occasional flash of inspiration that allows you to rise above this. The cover letter I wrote today happened in a mere 5 minutes. I proofread it twice and then sent it off. I know it's good. I know it's good precisely because it only took 5 minutes. I had that sort of intense, pleasurable concentration you feel when you are doing something you truly enjoy. For me, that usually comes when I am wall-climbing, or reading an inspiring book, or even writing this blog right now, but today it happened when I was writing a cover letter.
That's not to say that you should write a cover letter in 5 minutes. Never underestimate the value of planning what you are going to say ahead of time, and even outlining your cover letter (or any formal correspondence) before you start writing. It only took my five minutes because I have been writing 3-6 cover letters per week for about 3 months now, and even though many of them were uninspired, I still have a good idea of what I want to say. In fact, I am sure that part of my inspiration came from all of the mundane practice I have had at writing cover letters over the past while.
The point of all of this is that even when we are caught in negative patterns, I believe there is always a way to overcome them. If the bad news is that sometimes we get trapped in these negative-feedback loops, then the good news is that chances are inspiration will come one day and help us out. But don't sit there waiting for it. Inspiration is not a flash of lightning that strikes, coming out of nowhere and changing your life forever all in one moment. Inspiration is the culmination of hard work and practice and hard work and practice. Whatever your goal is, whatever your current equivalent of my cover letters is right now, you have it in your power to succeed.
5 comments:
For me the time to quit negative feedback loops is when I am too pissed off to continue. Whether through inspiration or just quitting, I just dislike the idea of being stuck in a cycle. It's better that it's inpiration that breaks us out of the cycle, but we can't sit and wait for it. It's better to have backup plans to prevent bad cycles. But if it's too late, then the question left is when and how to break the cycle, and it would a different answer for everyone and every situation.
Having read a ton of cover letters I totally understand what you're saying and I enjoyed your post!
I think too many people see a cover letter as "something that belongs in an application" and they throw something together that more-or-less repeats information from their resume.
Resumes are usually boring because they're just lists - even a good, well-polished resume is still usually boring even if the experience is exciting. Cover letters are the chance to let some personality shine through and give that poor person reading a stack of 50 applications something fun, exciting and engaging to read.
The most bizarre cover letter I have seen started with "Salutations!" and under that, in parenthesis, a note about how the applicant always wanted to use that in a cover letter. It caught me off-guard but the resume was solid and the cover letter had a ton of character and it really reflected the personality of the applicant (who ended up being our first pick for the job).
Re: the internet - when I was on the job hunt I created www.brahm.ca to be a resume supplicant. I had a lot of positive feedback from interviewers on things they saw on "the website" and I think it helped me get a few offers. Better have something like that float to the top of Google results than a slanderous Facebook post!
Thanks Lily and Brahm!
Hey Brahm, I am definitely interested in your approach. How did you decide what level of formality to strike on brahm.ca ? How much time and more importantly money does it take you to maintain that website?
Also, other than someone who is completely willing to break the rules, as in the example you gave, what else stood out in a cover letter to you?
Hey Colin, I designed my website primarily as a supplement to my resume, and secondarily as a "landing page" for information about me on the internet. My goal was to be the first result when my name was Googled, instead of a page outside of my control.
I wrote everything being conscious of potential employers who would be accessing the site, but I let a bit more personality come through and wrote in a semi-casual tone. The .ca domain name costs about $13/year and my webhosting is about $40/year, but you can get free webhosting on the Google Sites platform - simple to edit and maintain, and they look pretty sharp (for an example Google Site, see www.warkentinreunion.org). You can set it up just about as quickly as you can write it. Like I said, I had great feedback from interviewers on the website and I've talked others into doing this - see http://jasonsadowski.ca/.
The best cover letters really just need to be interesting to read. I think the biggest problem with student (and I'd assume, new graduate) cover letters is that a fair percentage of them tend to have this stale, overly formal, boring tone that (I suspect) we all learned in high school. If cover letters and resumes are supposed to differentiate you from your peers, why do so many strike the same dull tone? When you relax the overly-formal "please find enclosed my application for your review" tone in your cover letter, it's easier to build a connection with the person who is reading that stack of 50 applications, and you increase your odds of going into the "yes" pile.
If you'd like (no obligation!), I'd be happy to take a look at a copy of your cover letter & resume and send you some ideas, if I have any. I'd never claim that I'm the comprehensive authority on applications, but I've helped a lot of people "tighten the screws" on their applications and it's something I have fun doing. Feel free to fire it off to one of my email addresses (they all go to the same place).
Thanks Brahm! I appreciate the comments and the offer. I will probably be sending you an application some time in the future :P. Don't worry. I won't bombard you.
I have taken your advice and started a Google Site. We'll see if I can figure that all out and get a decent site up!
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