Cover letters are worthless unless you're looking for salespeople. You don't want applicants that can convince you they're obsessive fans of your company, you w

Cover letters are worthless unless you're looking for salespeople. You don't want applicants that can convince you they're obsessive fans of your company, you want applicants that are interested in their work and whose interests line up with the job you're offering. For many jobs, you don't even need that. There are a lot of jobs where any given applicant will have applied to dozens if not hundreds of companies. The only thing an enthusiastic cover letter tells you in those cases is that they are lying. Unless you're looking for co-founders or C-level managers, they don't have to have big ideas about how they can make your company better. But they should know how to do their job and be interested in finding ways to help you help them do their job better. Job applications are for coarse filtering based on vague qualifiers. Two years experience as a C# drone at a bank? Too bad, we're looking for Clojure greybeards. Shoddy formatting and everything is misspelled? We need people that care about the quality of their deliverables. And so on. It's a first impression, not a hiring decision. Of course this all depends on the number of applicants, the number of openings and the size of the company. But yes, if you expect certain things to be in a job application, be explicit about it. If you want the cover letter to answer some interview questions ahead of the actual interview, say so.