A Letter About Cover Letters

Here’s an email from a reader about cover letters that’s instructive:

Kevin, I get your emails and I compare them to others I have read. Almost everybody wants to tell what a great job they have done — saved millions, invented a new whatchamacallit, etc. Sure if your job did involve that then by all means take credit.

But a hell of a lot of us don’t have jobs like that, just everyday types where we may be a sales rep, nothing special, or whatever. HOW can we write a better cover leter? A regular guy in an uneventful job — how can we get attention?

Here’s my response …

Were you fired within the first 30 days of getting your last job? If not, you were either making more money or saving more money than you were getting paid in salary. This is axiomatic and applies to any job, from accountant to zoologist.

If you weren’t working in Cuba or North Korea, you were making your employer a profit somehow. It’s up to you to figure out exactly how much money that was, how you did it, and then stick those numbers in your cover letter (and your resume).

You don’t have to be the world’s greatest salesman to come up with eye-catching details and dollar signs, but you do have to sit down and think. It may take hours or days, but you have to think until you find those numbers.

This is exactly how you or any serious job seeker can get attention.

(Much more on this in my Simple Job Search Manifesto.)