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0 pointsKalium9y ago0 comments

You're right! Cover letters are all about demonstrating value. Cover letters are great for copywriters, marketers, and others whose primary output is prose for humans. In such cases, cover letters demonstrate competence for the job at hand.

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!

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imron9y ago· 1 in thread

Cover letters don't need to be paragraph after paragraph of prose, and they don't always go to HR drones either, see for example, the context of this thread because many of the who's hiring posts bypass HR drone screening.

> I've literally never had a good experience with a company that wanted a cover letter.

To provide a counter point, for a recent contracting job, I got an interview with a cover letter only (no resume), and then the position.

I had responded to a 'we're hiring' link at the end of a technical blog post (linked to from HN). I wrote a brief email introducing myself and talking about the value I thought could bring to the company (with links to examples of prior, related work), and that led to follow up emails and an interview. I don't think it would have gone any further if I had just sent an email saying 'Please find my resume attached' and then sent a generic resume.

KaliumOP9y ago

What did the cover letter that got you an interview look like? What it something that could not be describes as paragraphs of prose? What you say about it - introducing yourself, showing an understanding of their problems, talking about your value-add - sounds very likely to bear a strong resemblance to paragraphs of prose. Though if you tell me it was a series of limericks, I will be very impressed.

When I'm applying to a company of greater than fifty or so people, I tend to assume that any general-purpose resume-inbox will be read primarily by an HR person or recruiter. Not personally by a hiring manager. That would almost certainly be a poor use of time.

What, precisely, does a cover letter show that a well-composed resume doesn't for an in-house full-time engineer? A willingness to accept the received wisdom that authoring prose on demand demonstrates critical core competencies for software engineering job performance, perhaps?

To cap it all off, I've found that at scale the improved response rate from submitting applications with cover letters doesn't justify the increased time spent applying. Doing the reading and writing to create a halfway decent cover letter takes at a minimum 10x the time it takes to click "Apply with LinkedIn".

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