A cover letter is a personal career promotion tool, and by far it’s the most important document that appears in the job search package. Through this one page write up, you make your first contact with a potential employer, and you write persuasive statements to advertise your qualifications and value to offer to a potential company.
How to write a cover letter that will attract job interviews? The best way is to bench mark an effective format and duplicates its proven contents. Here are the important points.
- Before writing, spend some time to explore the potential company from the internet. Visit their homepage to learn about the products and services, mission statement, philosophy of the organization, latest news and the name of the hiring manager. You need this information when preparing your missive.
- Enclose your resume with a cover document without fail.
- Address your letter to a real person. Use the name you found through the research of the company, and don’t send your missive to a general recipient such as “Dear Human Resource Manager.”
- The opening paragraph should be effectively used to sell your qualification. State the position you’re interested, and reply to the advert precisely. Explain and prove how you can bring value to the prospective employer.
- Always send original copy with a signature. Consider to use a blue pen to sign your letter.
- Ask for an interview and mention in the letter that you will call the hiring manager to follow up with the arrangement of interview. This increases your chance to be scheduled for one.
- As the job hunting documents represent your reporting skills, always ensure they are free from typo, grammatical, punctuation and spelling mistakes.
- Use a light to medium weight, white paper.
- Don’t send common letters to many companies. Your missive should be customized to match the job requirement, and the industry or company.
- Use simple sentence structure and allow plenty of white space.
- Provide your day phone number and email address so that the employer can call you for interview.
Always make use of the proven template when preparing your job search document.