6 ms·

My experience is that small to medium size companies, where the person managing you is also screening resumes, pay much more attention to cover letters. I've ha

by cm2012 6y ago

My experience is that small to medium size companies, where the person managing you is also screening resumes, pay much more attention to cover letters. I've had my cover letters explicitly mentioned by these companies when hiring. I've also hired based on cover letters at these companies. Big companies don't look at all. HR or recruiter finds you by keyword OR you get referred by a friend for the job. Then 5 people who don't care take 20 minutes of their day to interview you. There's no chance for the cover letter to come up in this scenario. When I worked at BigCo I interviewed a decent amount of people and HR never handed me a cover letter to look at.

BeetleB 6y ago
The problem is I can't tell which companies will have an HR/recruiter vs a manager as the first filter. Almost all calls I've gotten from startups (most of which would be considered "small" companies) were via a recruiter. I guess if I apply to an established, small/medium company that is not a startup, it's more likely to be read by a manager.
- user5994461 6y ago
  When you say recruiter, do you mean HR from the company or an external recruiter?
  - jlokier 6y ago
    If they already know which company it is, they probably mean an internal recruiter. When going via external recruiters, you tend to know you're talking to a recruiter before you find out which company the job is with.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I think a rule of thumb is "by the time a company is large enough to have someone in tech doing full-time management, your application is going to pass through someone else before getting to them for a second pass of filtering." Small, scrappy startups will have the decision-maker doing the first-pass filtering. None of those people will be called "manager".
- scarface74 6y ago
  In 25 years, I’ve never randomly spammed applicant tracking systems. My first job was based on an internship and after that I used my network of former coworkers, managers, and local external recruiters.
xmprt 6y ago
My rule of thumb is I don't write a cover letter unless I have a good reason to write one. For example, I found a mid size company through an interesting blog post and felt like that was something worth mentioning and that I thought the company seemed interesting too. It was probably as short as a tweet but I got an email and subsequently an offer very soon after. Generic cover letters are a waste of everyone's time.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > Generic cover letters are a waste of everyone's time. "Generic cover letter" is an oxymoron. Cover letters are supposed to be individualized.
  - another-dave 6y ago
    The sample cover letter in the article is quite generic & doesn't seem much tailored to a particular job description.
    - azangru 6y ago
      > The sample cover letter in the article is quite generic Yes, the first paragraph in the cover letter is almost identical to the opening paragraphs of numerous spam emails. "You're building a great feedback organization product I think has great potential". Really? Well, ta very much; now tell us something we don't know.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        While I generally think a cover letter, even if mostly generic, is a good idea as a way of at least somewhat personalizing your application, there's a lot about that one that sort of turns me off. It would be a net negative for me.
- ciceryadam 6y ago
  Yup, exactly. I'm in central Europe, I've never written one and no-one missed it. If a cover letter was mandatory I didn't apply. Same when I was at the other end of the hiring process, I never required a cover letter, good people are in high demand, so why make them jump through unnecessary hoops.
rsj_hn 6y ago
I think this is correct. Be mindful of how HR is likely to work at the place that hires you. Big Co: there is some HR screener looking for keywords who hands a stack of resumes -- maybe a hundred -- to a hiring manager who has to quickly go through them and pick maybe 5-10 who will get a screen. If the screen goes well, it may go to a second screen or a full panel. The thing to keep in mind is that interviewing bears substantial costs for the firm. You are yanking 5-6 senior people out of usually an overloaded sprint to spend an hour and then more time writing up a form, so basically 1 day of work. But you may have 300 people applying. That means if everyone got a full panel, it would take 1 year of labor to fill 1 position. Obviously that's not possible, so the end result is going to be capricious for the person going through the process -- there's no way around that, as you can only have resources to do an indepth look at 5 out of those 300. So yes, interviewing sucks and you will often get unfairly ruled out for stupid stuff. We get it, but that's how it has to be and will continue to be as long as applying for a job is costless and open to everyone who can upload a pdf. It's just a bad equilibrium -- the more people apply per position, the more arbitrary the process becomes, which encourages more people to apply to many different positions to hedge their bets, which creates more resumes per position, etc. For really famous firms like Microsoft or Google, they may get 1000-3000 applications per positions. Even if most of these applicants are unsuitable, they still gum up the works and add more randomness to the process. OTOH, if it's a smaller company you don't get so many applying and they can afford to give a better look per resume, but then again it's going to depend on the job market situation. Still your odds are better. Strangely, it's rare for the candidate to actually think about what it's like on the other side of this and take steps that make it easier to process their resume. Stuff like: keep it to a single page, read the requirements in the job posting and include relevant experience/skills rather than a full dump of everything you did, etc. And never, ever, lie about a skill or experience. Try to make the resume easy to read for someone who has to read 100 of them per hour.
- jon-wood 6y ago
  As someone on the other side of the table now I’m almost at the point where I’ll bring anyone who provides a single page CV in for interview, just because they’ve clearly put some thought into it. I’m so sick of trawling through five page CVs which contain absolutely everything apart from a reason to hire you.

by cm2012 6y ago

BeetleB 6y ago

The problem is I can't tell which companies will have an HR/recruiter vs a manager as the first filter. Almost all calls I've gotten from startups (most of which would be considered "small" companies) were via a recruiter. I guess if I apply to an established, small/medium company that is not a startup, it's more likely to be read by a manager.

user5994461 6y ago
When you say recruiter, do you mean HR from the company or an external recruiter?
- jlokier 6y ago
  If they already know which company it is, they probably mean an internal recruiter. When going via external recruiters, you tend to know you're talking to a recruiter before you find out which company the job is with.
sokoloff 6y ago
I think a rule of thumb is "by the time a company is large enough to have someone in tech doing full-time management, your application is going to pass through someone else before getting to them for a second pass of filtering." Small, scrappy startups will have the decision-maker doing the first-pass filtering. None of those people will be called "manager".
scarface74 6y ago
In 25 years, I’ve never randomly spammed applicant tracking systems. My first job was based on an internship and after that I used my network of former coworkers, managers, and local external recruiters.

xmprt 6y ago

My rule of thumb is I don't write a cover letter unless I have a good reason to write one. For example, I found a mid size company through an interesting blog post and felt like that was something worth mentioning and that I thought the company seemed interesting too. It was probably as short as a tweet but I got an email and subsequently an offer very soon after. Generic cover letters are a waste of everyone's time.

BeetleB 6y ago
> Generic cover letters are a waste of everyone's time. "Generic cover letter" is an oxymoron. Cover letters are supposed to be individualized.
- another-dave 6y ago
  The sample cover letter in the article is quite generic & doesn't seem much tailored to a particular job description.
  - azangru 6y ago
    > The sample cover letter in the article is quite generic Yes, the first paragraph in the cover letter is almost identical to the opening paragraphs of numerous spam emails. "You're building a great feedback organization product I think has great potential". Really? Well, ta very much; now tell us something we don't know.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      While I generally think a cover letter, even if mostly generic, is a good idea as a way of at least somewhat personalizing your application, there's a lot about that one that sort of turns me off. It would be a net negative for me.
ciceryadam 6y ago
Yup, exactly. I'm in central Europe, I've never written one and no-one missed it. If a cover letter was mandatory I didn't apply. Same when I was at the other end of the hiring process, I never required a cover letter, good people are in high demand, so why make them jump through unnecessary hoops.

rsj_hn 6y ago

I think this is correct. Be mindful of how HR is likely to work at the place that hires you. Big Co: there is some HR screener looking for keywords who hands a stack of resumes -- maybe a hundred -- to a hiring manager who has to quickly go through them and pick maybe 5-10 who will get a screen. If the screen goes well, it may go to a second screen or a full panel. The thing to keep in mind is that interviewing bears substantial costs for the firm. You are yanking 5-6 senior people out of usually an overloaded sprint to spend an hour and then more time writing up a form, so basically 1 day of work. But you may have 300 people applying. That means if everyone got a full panel, it would take 1 year of labor to fill 1 position. Obviously that's not possible, so the end result is going to be capricious for the person going through the process -- there's no way around that, as you can only have resources to do an indepth look at 5 out of those 300. So yes, interviewing sucks and you will often get unfairly ruled out for stupid stuff. We get it, but that's how it has to be and will continue to be as long as applying for a job is costless and open to everyone who can upload a pdf. It's just a bad equilibrium -- the more people apply per position, the more arbitrary the process becomes, which encourages more people to apply to many different positions to hedge their bets, which creates more resumes per position, etc. For really famous firms like Microsoft or Google, they may get 1000-3000 applications per positions. Even if most of these applicants are unsuitable, they still gum up the works and add more randomness to the process. OTOH, if it's a smaller company you don't get so many applying and they can afford to give a better look per resume, but then again it's going to depend on the job market situation. Still your odds are better. Strangely, it's rare for the candidate to actually think about what it's like on the other side of this and take steps that make it easier to process their resume. Stuff like: keep it to a single page, read the requirements in the job posting and include relevant experience/skills rather than a full dump of everything you did, etc. And never, ever, lie about a skill or experience. Try to make the resume easy to read for someone who has to read 100 of them per hour.

jon-wood 6y ago
As someone on the other side of the table now I’m almost at the point where I’ll bring anyone who provides a single page CV in for interview, just because they’ve clearly put some thought into it. I’m so sick of trawling through five page CVs which contain absolutely everything apart from a reason to hire you.