If you have been following along with our series on how to tune up your resume, you’re going to notice a few things about your resume. It should look like it tells a story: your story. Now, it’s not your whole story, there is a lot missing because it does not belong on any resume or because it’s not relevant to the positions you’ve been applying for. Still, it shouldn’t take a giant leap of the imagination for any reader to build that narrative your resume is telling. BUT JUST INCASE, there is this amazing thing known as a cover letter! The cover letter paints the resume narrative for them, highlights some plot points they may have missed, and shows them exactly why your entire life has been leading up to the point where you apply to their organization. Realistically, we all know that Communications degree was a shot in the dark and there may have been some lost months before you dusted off those Cheetos from your fingertips and saw the job posted on Craigslist between binging episodes of Iron Fist –but that’s not what the cover letter is about!

A Simple Necessity

Let’s get some facts out of the way. According to a 2014 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 41% of employers consider cover letters important or very important. When two out of five say it’s important, you need to pay attention. Further, another 22% percent of employers say it is a mistake to exclude a cover letter. Realistically, we are looking at only two out of five employers being okay with you not including a cover letter. Three out of five employers believe that it is important to include or that it looks bad if you don’t have a cover letter.  The employers that are less likely to look at a cover letter are typically the larger private companies (500+ employees ). The employers that particularly pay attention to cover letters are smaller companies and government or public organizations. Think about it like this: if you are applying to a national conglomerate, cover letters are not going to play a huge factor. If you are applying to a small community organization, you can imagine they would be interested in knowing a little bit about your story before they bring you in for an interview. Most companies are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, but you should know that the size of the company and the number of applicants they can expect plays a large role in determining whether or not they can afford to pay attention to your cover letter.

Cover letters are not something you should stress about. First and foremost, while most employers appreciate you sending a cover letter and will make a judgment based on your ability to follow directions, that does not mean they will actually read the letter. While you should certainly include a cover letter in your application, stressing over a document that will likely not be read is not an effective use of time during your job search. You also shouldn’t stress because you should not be putting a tremendous amount of resources into your cover letter. Employers prefer concise cover letters that are AT MOST one page, with most employers agreeing that a half page cover letter is the ideal length. Many employers simply say “the shorter the better” when it comes to these documents.  As you can see, while there may not be too much emphasis on the content of the cover letter, its presence can be enough to tell employers enough to make a judgment.

Most people think a cover letter is like you shaking your own hand, commenting about how firm your grip is, and telling everyone that was the best handshake of your life.

Context is Key

A good cover letter is not a repetition of what was on your resume. It is not the minutes from the me-club meeting. It provides context for your accomplishments and shows the employer where they fit in along the route of your career. It answers all the lingering questions that your resume may have left:

• Is this person going to leave after ___ months?
• What was that gap in employment about?
• If they’re so good, why didn’t they get promoted at their last job?
• Does this person care about the work or are they in it just for the check/benefits/exposure?
• Who put the bomp in the bomp shebop shebop?
• Isn’t this position a step down for them? Why are they applying?
• Why are they trying to do X if all their experience is in Y ?

Each of these questions is a potential deal-breaker if left unexplained. An interview would also be a great place to explain these things, but you need to earn that first. If your cover letter does not touch any of the questions your resume leaves, good luck getting called in for that interview. Not every resume has questions that are left unanswered and not every reader will have the same questions after reading your resume. You need to put yourself in the shoes of the hiring manager and be very honest about the final impression your resume leaves. If you can’t do this, ask for help. Have someone (or two or three) go over your resume and ask them if they have ANY reservations about hiring this person. THEN ask yourself if these reservations are appropriate to address on your resume. If not, cover letter to the rescue! These are the questions YOUR cover letters need to address in order to make the reader confident you will make them look good when you are hired. If you leave this up to their own devices, they will fill in the blanks themselves with an excuse not to hire you.

So I Don’t Need A Cover Letter if I’m Perfect?

You don’t need a cover letter if you don’t need a job. Aside from the primary purpose of soothing the worries of a neurotic hiring manager who is one bad hire away from creating their own cover letters, there are other things your cover letter does to help. Again, it’s not here to waste time telling me things I already saw on the resume. There are other details about yourself that increase your chances of being hired that do not belong on your resume.  You need to get as many of these that apply to you on your cover letter as possible. You never know which detail will be the deciding factor for the reader, so casting the widest net possible is your best bet to sink the bait (That’s how you fish, right?). If you are interested in doing everything you can to secure that job, you are interested in having a functional cover letter.