You might send out 20 resumes. As a hiring manager - especially when using a "no filter" approach like posting on here (keep in mind that IME people posting jobs on Hacker News are more likely doing "guerilla hiring" and circumvent their HR departments) - I easily get 100+ resumes, and I don't have days to spend trawling through them. I think it was rands of randsinrepose who mentioned before that the average time an HR person or a manager gets to spend on figuring out if a deeper dive is worth it is about 30s.
So I have to filter them by something. If you as an applicant - who would like at least an interview with me -can't even put in the effort to write in a few sentences that tell me why I should look at your resume, I somehow have to assume that you'll put in similar effort after I hire you. That's not a good first impression and IMHO it counts when you're dealing with a hiring manager as opposed to an HR department.
Keep in mind I'm not asking you to write a cover novel. Put yourself in my shoes and tell me which of the resumes you'd look at if you have only limited time:
1. The one that says
"My resume attached", or fewer words to that effect
2. The one that says
"Hey, I'm applying for your job opening because I love writing web apps in Ruby on Rails with a ClojureScript front end".
Your strategy is yours to choose.
PS: I had someone insist on the opposite process where they only looked at people who HR rejected, their team was awesome if a little odd.
This seems like a reasonable deal to me.
You do need to demonstrate that you can solve the problems of the potential employer.
People advertising for a job have a business problem to solve. If you can demonstrate that not only can you solve that problem but that you have solved similar problems for other businesses before, then you stand a greater chance of making it through to an interview.
However, software engineering is not such a job. A cover letter showcasing a software engineer's ability to author vaguely reality-flavored prose and get past the HR drone doing the reading is not showcasing their ability to perform critical job functions to address business needs. Such an engineer is spending significant amounts of their time to tick a prediction-value-free box on someone else's ill-informed list.
I've literally never had a good experience with a company that wanted a cover letter. I've done it dozens of times. In every single case, with precisely zero exceptions, it's produced no value for me. I've been on the other end of hiring processes as well, and there I've similarly found precisely zero value in cover letters across dozens of cases. Fact-dense and fluff-light resumes are much more valuable.
Code samples? Great! Toy problems? Great! Prose? Not so great.
Do you need help solving the problem you appear to have where you may be misevaluating candidates by measuring them wrong? I have some ideas! It could be costing you the best candidates!
What if the all the people who tell how they love writing web apps in RoR are just bullshitting you in the hopes that you really believe it? What if they're mostly just very excited newbies who haven't yet had the time to figure out that maybe it's not so exciting and lovely after all?
I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, but it sounds like you choose very arbitrary filters. Not that I can recommend a better filter, if your time is indeed so limited.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head about the filters - they have some arbitrariness to them, and most people outside (and, if my experience is anything to go by, inside) HR use filters that work for them based on experience in the past. I'm not saying they are fair and unbiased (they aren't), but they work for that particular person.
I for example would perfectly OK with you emailing me (if I were hiring, which I'm not) a cover email that says something like "I have the skills you're looking for, I like the area your company is in, and I'm looking for a job that allows me to bring my dog to work and have a work/life balance". That's again specific to the hiring manager tho', I'd take refreshing honesty over someone trying to visibly BS me any day.
What a lot of people don't immediately see is that if a company is hiring, they're not looking to hire your resume - they're hiring a person (which a specific skill set) that they're going to spend 8-10h/day with. A cover email can convey more about you personally than a list of past accomplishments.
You don't need to say you love writing web apps in RoR, but you should at least say that you are good at writing web apps in RoR (if that's the position being hired). If you have real world examples you can point to of things you have built as well as approximate site load/scale stats, even better.
You don't need to love the work, but you do need to be able to solve the problems the business is facing. In my experience, the better you are able to convey that, the better your likelihood of getting an interview and then a job.
Probably not. If someone is doing something they don't like, they tend to stop doing it so well as time goes on. While it may work out for a while, people usually need to care at some level about what they're doing to do a good job. Not everyone, sure, but I wouldn't take the chance.
There is also a lot more to working than just doing a job. Working around people who don't care about their work is demoralizing.
Maybe it's not so common in SV startups that insist on hiring lovers. But in other industries it might be more of a rule than an exception.
It is your job to look through resume's. This is what you are paid to do. You claim to be a hiring manager. It is not my responsibility to convince you to do the job you are paid to do. My resume contains all the information you need to make the determination of whether I am qualified for the job, including "I love writing web apps in Ruby on Rails with a ClojureScript front end" adds nothing to the application but does waste my time.
As such, it is up to them how much time they spend hiring, and it is up to them what heuristics they use in that. Because, ultimately, time spent on hiring is time they're not spending actually helping the other team members who they have already hired, and it is only indirectly related to actually delivering the thing they are supposed to deliver (whereas they may have demands on their time that -directly- affect the delivery).
It is also up to you whether or not you try to help them by showing you have actually read the posting, and know something about the company, and whatever other heuristic they have. That's totally your prerogative. But you do not have -any- standing to fault someone whose job is delivering something with not considering you because you didn't want to put in some effort.
I agree with this point. Writing that sort of sentence is meaningless fluff.
That being said, you need to think of things from the position of the people hiring you. The manager is going to give the tech lead a bunch of resumes and cover letters and ask them to read through them and make a short list of 5 (or whatever) to interview.
If they are looking to hire someone to build RoR web apps with a ClojureScript front end, then you make the tech lead's job easier if your resume and cover letter highlight your experience building RoR web apps with a ClojureScript front end - or if you don't have that, at least point out how your other experience means you can still solve their problem.
While it is possible that a generic resume contains all the information needed to make a determination of whether you are qualified for the job, you should be emphasizing the parts relevant to the current job so the person putting together a short list doesn't have to study your resume, instead, they can look at your application for 30 seconds and go:
Yep, yep, yep, wow this person has everything we're looking for, onto the short list they go.
Because here's the thing. The tech lead is usually a busy person and they've got better things to do than spend and hour or two sifting through resumes.
When I've had to do it, I'd take a quick first pass through all the resumes and put them in one of three piles: easy yes, easy no and maybe.
If all the relevant information is in your resume but I have to hunt around for it, then you'll likely end up on the maybe pile.
If I get through the stack of resumes and my easy yes pile has enough candidates, then the maybe pile doesn't get a further look, because I'm trying to minimize the time I have to spend looking at resumes.
I diligently entered cover letter and resume information into a spreadsheet when hiring, and to be perfectly honest, the only correlation I could find between cover letter + resume and interview results was resume length.
What I have is interviewing lots and lots of people over a couple of decades, first contributing to hiring decisions and eventually making them myself. As developers you see patterns emerge and you start making use of them. For a halfway efficient review process you have to make a first pass over the resume submissions and whittle the pile down to a manageable size quickly, making use of patterns spotted in the past.
In that respect, my experience tells me that "no cover email at all" = "shotgunned resume to every job listing" = "not a good fit". That might not always be the case, but it's an 80/20 rule. Yes, I'll potentially overlook a couple of qualified candidates, but I'm probably already doing this after work instead of spending time with my family because I've decided to essentially circumvent the HR department.
Part of the cover letter conundrum is that if you come in through the front door (ie, the official job listing curated by HR), your resume is likely landing in some HR system and the hiring manager might not even see it. In that case, it's a total waste of effort.
If you're coming in through the "back door", say, via a post here on Hacker News, there is a good chance that your first contact is the actual hiring manager. She or he will probably at least skim your cover email.
Number two strikes me as trite enough to earn negative points, particularly the use of 'love'.
