How to Write a Cover Letter

Cover letters are easy to write badly and just hard enough to write well that most people don’t bother. That’s your opportunity. A decent cover letter — even 400 crisp words — puts you ahead of 80% of applicants who submit generic boilerplate or skip it entirely.

This guide covers how to write a cover letter that actually gets read, without clichés, without templates, and without the painful intro “I am writing to apply for…”

1. Start with why you care about this job

Not a list of qualifications. Not “I am excited to apply.” A genuine sentence about why this specific role at this specific company caught your attention. Specificity here signals real research. “I’ve used your product X since 2022 and was delighted when I saw role Y.”

2. Keep it under one page

3-4 paragraphs. 300-500 words. Hiring managers spend 60-90 seconds on a cover letter at most. Anything longer is skimmed or skipped. Respect the reader’s time and edit aggressively. Shorter is harder and better.

3. Lead with your strongest specific result

Not “I am a hard worker.” But “At Acme, I rebuilt the onboarding flow and raised trial-to-paid conversion from 11% to 19%.” Concrete numbers and concrete outcomes. Show, don’t claim. See our resume guide for more on this.

4. Make it about them, not you

Weak pattern: “I want to learn and grow in this role.” Strong pattern: “Your team is scaling the payments platform, and my work on X/Y/Z at Acme directly addresses the challenges I saw in your engineering blog.” Frame yourself as a solution to their problem.

5. Address the job posting specifically

Read the posting 3 times. Note the 3-5 key skills or outcomes they emphasize. In the cover letter, explicitly connect your experience to those. Generic letters signal that you applied to 50 roles and spent 2 minutes on this one.

6. Avoid clichés

“I’m a team player.” “Passionate about excellence.” “Self-starter.” These phrases are so overused they carry no signal. Replace every cliché with a specific example of the behavior the cliché was trying to describe.

7. Write like a human

Use contractions. Use “I.” Read it aloud — if it sounds stiff, rewrite. Cover letters that sound like LinkedIn buzzword soup get filed mentally under “mass applicant.” Human voice stands out. Our writing guide has more on this.

8. Don’t repeat your resume

The resume is the resume. The cover letter is the story a resume can’t tell — why you care, why you’re specifically good for this, the context behind the accomplishments. If your cover letter just restates the resume, it’s wasted paper.

9. Close with a clear next step

“I’d welcome the chance to talk about how my experience with X could help your team with Y.” Direct, confident, action-oriented. Don’t grovel. Don’t use phrases like “I hope you will consider me.” Confidence (without arrogance) reads well.

10. Proofread ruthlessly

Typos kill cover letters. Read it 3 times. Read it aloud. Run it through a grammar tool. Get a friend to read it. One typo is survivable; two is damaging; three puts you out of the running at a detail-oriented company.

11. Customize every letter

Yes, for every job. Yes, it takes 30 minutes. Yes, it’s worth it. A targeted cover letter to 10 jobs beats a generic one to 100. The ROI on customization is enormous for the 1-3 jobs you actually want.

12. Know when to skip it

If the application says “cover letter optional” — still write one. If the application has no cover letter field — skip it. Don’t email it cold unless asked. Over-sending is a signal of desperation.

A simple structure

Paragraph 1: Why this specific job caught you. Paragraph 2: A concrete result that shows you can do it. Paragraph 3: How your background maps to their needs. Paragraph 4: Clear close with next step. That’s the whole letter.