Cover letters were an annoyance to begin with, but in the days of one-click job applications and LLMs, they serve no purpose and only waste everyone’s time and bandwidth.
The Atlantic claims the first request for a cover letter for employment was in a New York Times ad for Dutch Boy Paints. If that seems more recent than you’d expect, remember that the US was an agrarian society through the nineteenth century and was industrial in the first half of the twentieth century. You didn’t need a cover letter to work on a farm or assembly line (although Ford Motor Company famously would do surprise home visits to its employees to ensure their home-life met standards the company set).
There have been many calls to remove the cover letter, claiming it’s more of a performance hoop than anything else. I myself never liked them since I could find more relevant detail by skimming a well formatted resume for 5-10 seconds than trying to parse the prose of a letter. But something changed to cause the end of the cover letter question to shift from a debate to a denouement: generative AI.
Generative AI, powered by LLMs (large language models), can churn out relevant prose in seconds. When ChatGPT went mainstream in early 2023 science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld had gotten overwhelmed with AI generated articles. Just twenty days into the month they had, in addition to 700 legitimate submissions, 500 stories seemingly written by AI. Editor-in-chief Neil Clarke said it was growing at such a rate it would have doubled the number of submissions they normally get. And that was when most people hadn’t yet heard of ChatGPT.
Most writers will tell you the science fiction stories aren’t quite there yet; well-written human ones are still better. But cover letters are much simpler than short stories. There’s no plot or dialog, no drama or comedy, just matching words and phrases from the resume to ones in the job description. LLMs can do this all day long without breaking a sweat.
If you don’t believe me, you can try it yourself. Grab a job post online and your resume. Try a prompt in your favorite LLM such as, “Write a cover letter for the following job post based on the attached resume.” If you have a generic cover letter you can also have it revise that cover letter for the particular job. Either way, you’ll have a cover letter in seconds.
The only issue I saw when trying this was that it tended to be an older, exaggerated style that was more common in the 1980s and 1990s, e.g., “I’m excited to apply for . . .” “passionate about” “strong <something> skills”. This is likely because it was trained on example cover letters from those times, but you can quickly remove some of the superfluous words to sound more modern.
I remember when my father would apply for jobs. He sat at the typewriter updating his resume which was then photocopied; but each cover letter was typed by hand. Today when employees can apply to jobs in seconds and companies will get hundreds, if not thousands of applicants and the cover letter is now done by machine, not applicant, what’s the point? It’s e-clutter that isn’t going to help filter candidates.
The next time you post a job, ask yourself the following: will the cover letter help you select candidates. And if the answer is yes, ask if it is used as the first step of the process? Unless you begin by reading all cover letters and selecting ones for further reconsideration there’s no point asking for one. Doing so just burns CPU cycles. If you will use it at some point in the process, then ask for it just from those candidates at that cycle. It’s very reasonable to ask candidates in a later stage to do a small write up, and if the write up that helps you most is a cover letter so be it (although I can’t imagine it tells you more than what you got during a conversation, but that’s your decision).
The cover letter had its time. Like hand-written (as opposed to email) thank you notes after an interview, it’s time for them to retire.
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