Without a face-to-face meeting, the cover letter is about as personal as you can get. It’s the one thing in your job application that reveals as much as possible about you, your personality and your attention to detail.
So needless to say, it’s got to be spot on in introducing you as the perfect candidate. But before you attach it to your resume, there are some things you should do. The top six are included below:
- Read it out loud. Your cover letter should be conversational but somewhat formal. To achieve just the right balance, try reading your cover letter out load for tone. Does it sound braggy? Are there any sentences or phrases that could be interpreted two ways—positive and negative? Is it interesting? Does it have passion? Do you repeat yourself? Does each sentence build on the next?
- Read it to a friend. If you can’t answer the readability question with enough self-appraisal, read your cover letter to a trusted friend or colleague. He or she should be able to spot the areas that sound forced or need improvement.
- Read it the next day. Many job candidates are in such a rush to get their application out that they omit this all-important step. Employers generally wait a week or so before they begin opening the avalanche of letters they get these days. So it’s better to be right than first. You’d be surprised how different a letter can sound if left to percolate for 24 hours. There are things that come to mind the next day that you may not have thought of. Things like tone, emphasis, style and even content.
- Read it again for typos, grammar, accuracy. Pretty obvious. But many applicants are in such a hurry to get their letter out that they only give it a cursory look after running it through the spell checker. There are always little things that spell checkers miss. And certain words and groupings have a way of being missed by the naked eye—unless read slowly, over and over.
- Have someone else read it. It's not easy to spot your own mistakes. People tend to fill in for missing words. Commas tend to crop up where they shouldn't. And excessively long sentences appear shorter when the writer scans over them. An enthusiastic tone can be misinterpretted as over-confident. Imporatnt details can be glossed over without enough emphaisis.
- Make sure you sign it. Many job applicants think that all they have to do is type in their name. But it’s important to sign your letter as well. It’s your final and personal stamp that’s uniquely yours, and it says you are entirely responsible for the contents of the letter. Don’t use a script font or other computer program to print your signature. And be sure to use only blue or black ink.
Okay, now you can attach your cover letter to your resume and then, wait for the phone to ring.
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