All the right words say nothing
I’ve been combing through resumes and cover letters lately, and the experience has left me weary. Fortunately, I haven’t had to write a cover letter myself in a while (hooray for professional contentment). I say fortunately because writing cover letters is the worst: the tension between what you want to say and how you feel you should express it, the inclusion of the right words that let your audience know you know your stuff. It’s way more exhausting to write them than it is to read them, but still — reading them has made me think again about how useless they are.
I used to tell my students that a cover letter, as a companion to one’s resume, was there to make sense out of the experience in that document. It’s there to explain what an observer sees on your resume — to call attention to how one is a fit for the role at hand, how the experiences reflected there have molded you into a candidate worth consideration.
When I read cover letters, I’m looking for that explanation, and also some sense of the candidate as a person. I’m interested in tone, maybe a little dash of humanity. Often what I see is jargon — a big pile of “all the right words” that we feel compelled to include as some kind of secret handshake between us and the person reading to signify that we know what we’re talking about. It has gotten to the point that I feel like I need to read between all of those cumbersome lines of corporate-speak to get a glimpse of the candidate.
Maybe I’m thinking more about this because I’m watching Ken Burns’ excellent Hemingway documentary, but I find myself wanting cover letters (and overall, any professional communication) that sound like actual human beings. I want sentences in good, vigorous English: subject, verb, object. There just seems to be a mismatch between what would be useful in a cover letter vs. what we all think we have to provide in one. If your resume accurately reflects your experience and education, then your cover letter doesn’t need “leveraging excellence,” “data-driven thinker,” and “humanistic leader.”
The cover letter is the first chance you get to really say something to the organization you’re interested in joining. It isn’t a code to be cracked, a cipher that shows inside knowledge. It should give a glimpse into who you are, what’s important to you, and what it is in you that responds to what that organization/job role is all about. As I said, I’m very grateful not to be writing any cover letters right now, but the next time I have to, I think I’ll channel Hemingway (only with less misogyny and racism).
