My first job out of college was back in the days when you bought a newspaper and looked in the classifieds.
I set up a mail merge in word to generate cover letters for hundreds of jobs. Each entry in the database had a single sentence related to the job to make the cover letter look like it was written just for that job.
Years after I was hired, my boss told me that they received hundreds of applicants, but I stood out because I took the time to write a cover letter to go with my resume.
It was an IT job, so I always figured it was less cheating and more a confirmation of my skills.
Now we use AI to write resumes and cover letters for every possible eligible job listing that will all get read by AI thousands at a time. And it will still be a shit job that doesn’t pay you enough to live on.
Even better, each job app asks for something specific so you have to alter or re-write your cover letter hundreds of times for the hundreds of apps you have to submit to get a single shitty job.
Or they have a questionnaire, so instead of just submitting the cover letter and resume you’ve painstakingly constructed (and probably having to alter those), you have to type a paragraph long answer for each of the questions, amounting to at least another page or two you have to generate every. single. time.
I work in IT and essentially every job app had a questionnaire.
That way when you get a job you feel like you’ve won some sort of dystopian lotto and are just happy you aren’t starving in a gutter. Feels intentional.
Then your cover letter should say that.
I once send single empty page pdf file and during call hr assumed their pdf viewer was broken. I haven’t denied it.
did u get the job?
I don’t remember it was very long time ago and I was desperate so I was applying in masses.
Please find attached my AI generated resume in response to your AI generated job listing.
I’ve had to eat a whole bus tire in a job interview.
funny story: once i sent a generic cover letter to a bunch of entry-level jobs. one responded that i didn’t tailor the cover letter to the position, so i changed the title and sent them the same cover letter. they didn’t respond lol
i didn’t tailor the cover letter to the position
You should have printed it out and cut it into the shape of a shirt.
“I noticed you need workers and have money. What a coincidence, I have work and need money. Trade?”
No, of course not. I also need you to be miserable. A fair trade won’t help me break your spirit. Maybe beg a little and kiss my ass and I’ll consider it.
And that’s why I’m still unemployed!
If I thought anyone was going to read it, I would feel less bad about writing them.
We absolutely read them at my place, and they make a huge difference on who will and won’t get an interview.
We have to write multiple professional letters daily that all end up being subject to Open Records requests. If you can’t handle a simple cover letter you aren’t worth interviewing.
I read them 🥲. Not a corpo tho.
I just use AI to summarize it for me so it takes less time to read it.
2026 is all about burning gasoline to drive into an office instead of using the infrastructure that was proven to allow WFH, while forests are burning from global warming and countries are running out of oil. All so you can read and AI summary of something written by another AI.
Not judging you, ya gotta do what you gotta do to pay the bills. Just remarking at how absurd the world has become.
I wish I never looked at your username.
I wonder if it’s the same guy from reddit
If I had a nickel…
Holy shit lil nepetiz. Dude says something about AI and doesn’t get downvoted. What the fuck Lemmy
‘hey losers. looks like you need shit to get done. hire me or stay sucking. peace out’
(actually i’m contemplating falsely applying to jobs i have no intention of actually seeking and literally using this as my cover letter just to see if anything funny happens…)
(i like the job i already have)3 reasons you need an employee
-
You can’t do it yourself
-
You don’t have time to do it yourself
-
You really don’t want to do it yourself
Your move boss-man.
- You need to increase your head count or your budget will go down next fiscal year
-
Why ARE cover letters still a thing??
I really don’t understand why myself. It’s not like a person is going to look at it anyway. It’s all automated now, anything that is short of a perfect image of what the HR thinks they need for the role gets throw out way before any actual human sees them.
A cover letter was great at the beginning because it let the HR person be able to get a summary of what the person has to offer without having to go into technical details of the resume, but now its all automated anyway so if its made it to the HR desk then they can just look at the details.
Now it’s just more AI text to shit out and hope their AI scanners pick up the correct keywords.
I have no idea what anyone else does, but I look at them as a chance to explain why my resume is a match for the job. Some people rewrite their whole resume every application to tailor it to the job, but that feels like more work and they’re going to know I did it when they see my LinkedIn and it doesn’t match. So I highlight the stuff that’s specific to that job because my resume wasn’t necessarily written just for that job opening.
When I was a hiring manager, I treated it like a writing test to make sure people were basically literate. Reading and writing was super important in the field I was hiring for. I couldn’t get the same from a resume. That was before everybody was using AI to lie about everything to everybody else.
But in that case it’s more like a technical exam.
It very literally was just a cover letter. Nothing different about it than any other cover letter for any other job.
Cos of the Boomer Managers. Boomers are allergic to changes lol
The more willing someone is to jump through hoops to get a job, the less likely they are to demand to be paid what it’s worth.
☹️
Confirms candidate knows what job they have applied for, can read simple instructions like “send cover letter”, also vibe / culture check.
this… is actually fair tbh, the current applicant applies to so many different jobs, some people I know just mass apply to every job available. This would weed out people who did that.
Abuse me harder, Corpo Daddy 🫦
Congratulations, you’ve passed the vibe check.
I get that the grind looking for a job can be tough.
As a small business with just 3 or 4 staff hiring is also tough.
Hiring the wrong person is very, very costly.
I dont think that asking for confirmation that an applicant has read the job advert is “abuse”, but if you do then there’s no need to apply I guess.
It’s not just your small business though. It’s Every. Single. Application.
Could I use a template? Actually probably not as more and more businesses are asking for specifics in the cover letters to combat templates and AI use.
To the business owner it’s only a few minutes to write cover letter, but when people are applying for dozens of jobs a day, that all ask for unique responses, and quizzes, and forms that are identical to the CV you are required to upload, it gets very hard to write an even vaguely inspired response to “why do you want to sell kebabs out of my food truck for minimum wage?”
I can’t speak for food truck guy but in a way part of the reason for cover letters is that they discourage drive bys like that. A bit like a bot test for visiting a website these days. “Do a little extra to prove you’re real”.
I totally understand that people work in exchange for money, but there’s loads of places you can work for money. As the employer there’s an advantage in hiring a person that specifically wants to work for me, or at least employers like me.
That means, candidates that reviewed 24 job postings and applied for the 6 which are more desirable to them, are the candidates which are much more desirable to me. People that just want a job and any job will do are obviously less desirable.
A template is fine, and kind of expected honestly.
Do interviews then. Cover letters discourages the real people whereas the"drive bys", as you called them, will just crap something out with AI in 2 seconds.
Asking for interviews also shows you’re as invested in finding a good match for an employee as the employee is in finding a good boss.
Dude, there are millions of fake job offerings out there just looking to scrape data. You have to send out hundreds of applications just to get to one or two genuine offers. With the addition of mandatory bespoke cover letters, looking for a job becomes more work than an actual full time job.
What would you like me to do about that, as an employer?
I have been on the job hunt side of things. I applied for +50 jobs in a week with unique cover letters and CVs catered to the fields I am applying for. I have qualifications and experience in the fields I was applying to.
I got three responses.
One was a scam. Another was a 2 week temp job with “the opportunity for further work”. So another scam. The last one was the only legitimate offer I received, and it paid the minimum amount it could under the award.
I can empathise with an employer not wanting to sift through AI submissions or fly bys, but all they’ve done is turn that back onto applicants. Then they act entitled when people don’t want to jump through their hoops and say stupid shit like “if you can’t write a cover letter maybe this isn’t the job for you”
I dont think that asking for confirmation that an applicant has read the job advert
Honestly there are way less annoying and time consuming ways to do this for you and the applicant, like just including a line in the posting “To confirm you’ve read the job description, all interested applicants should apply via emailing their resume to x@y.com with the job title and location in the subject line,” or something.
Cover letters are complete bullshit as they are currently used. If I were applying to a management role in a niche industry, or something in the C-suite or other positions one would only get after advancing a fair bit in their career, I can understand the point of a cover letter. When the hardware store wants a cover letter for their part-time cashier position or Taco Bell wants one for their shift manager job? They can get fucked, everything relevant to the candidate’s suitability for the role ought to already be in their resume, and at that point companies are just seeing who’s willing to degrade themselves the most and jump through the most hoops.
When everyone and their dog wants me to write them a cover letter telling them how it’s been my lifelong dream to have chance to listen to middle-aged ladies go apeshit over some coupon not scanning right in my new post as a Joann Fabric Cashier (<12 hour per week position), I cannot be bothered with it. At this point, it’s become so stupidly widespread beyond roles where it would actually be useful, I refuse to write them on principal and just assume that if a company rejected my application on that basis, they’re the sort of clueless people I wouldn’t want to work for anyway.
I think the better alternative since it won’t kill application flows, is have a field somewhere saying that they need to mention the title of the job in a field that doesn’t make sense what it actually is,
such as have a duplicate middle name field, but specify in the job description that the second middle name field should be what the jobs listed title is.
To someone who didn’t read the job applicant, they would think that an error was made creating the job posting, but to anyone who bothered to read it they would know the second field is intended to be the verification process.
Anyone who doesn’t supply the job title (case insensitive all special chars like trailing whitespace and ’ removed) as the second field just gets auto rejected
Sure, I am going to take unpaid time to write your little essay to pass your paternalistic test. “Oh it should only take a couple of minutes to write”, I hear you say. It would also only take a couple of minutes to talk to me. Must not be serious about working with peers.
Oh man.
I’m hiring right now. I’ve had more than 100 applicants and spent about 2 days reviewing them and asking screening questions in chat.
I didn’t reject any on the basis that they did not provide a cover letter, but in those cases I did need to ask more questions to try to get some idea of who the candidate was.
It takes a lot more than a couple of minutes to talk to someone. Even short interviews take a minimum of 30 minutes because I need to arrange a time, then talk, then make some notes. I’d say an hour is more reasonable estimate.
I’m not quite sure what that jab about working with peers means.
I understand your situation might involve dealing with countless asshole corporations who are intent on exploiting you, but it’s a mistake to conclude that every employer the world over is the same.
But how will they know that you want the job?
An unfathomable mystery
Because my ChatGPT cover letter has a direct shortcut to their AI-addicted brains.
I’m tempted to just straight up use AI without proofreading next time I’m in need of a job. If anything, just to see wether or not it works. Judging by a quick 2 minute look at Linkedin, it must be what they want.
With Claude my cover letters take all of 15 minutes to “write.” It’s like the old Soviet adage (slightly adjusted): They pretend to read them, so we pretend to write them.
funny how literally the only thing i consistently see AI being useful for is the pointless bullshit tasks that don’t accomplish anything but the further complication of shit that didn’t need to be so complicated in the first place. such as busywork. They’re jerking us around to waste our time so i see no reason to treat their time as though it’s particularly valuable either; turnabout is fair play, after all.
As a EUrangutan I had to google what a cover letter means and now I am depressed.
Very common in Germany.
I’ve definitely seen cover letters in some job postings in the eu
Are your CVs typically just bullet points about experience and education?
Yep pretty much, we have a EU format for CVs and maybe add a little letter of why you think you are the right person for the job and that’s it, something short
Some examples:
Examples
Yes, makes it easier for the recruiter. that’s how it’s taught at school, too. At least was, haven’t been in school for a while but have applied for jobs using this format.
Sometimes they ask to write a small letter about how you think you are right for this job. I thought that was the cover letter. It’s not supposed to be very long.
I think it depends on the country and industry. I never ever had to write a cover letter, but then again most of my jobs the company recruiters found and messaged me instead of the other way around. On the other hand one of my friends had to recently write a detailed cover letter and heavily customize their CV for every job they applied to.
I honestly don’t know. I found my job through an employment agency, I worked there a few months and they offered me a permanent contract. I said yes and that was nine years ago.
Are they hiring now?? 😂
