Short and Powerful

From: Karen Silins

Writing a cover letter doesn't have to be a painful, arduous process. You're not writing a 300-page novel, after all. You're writing a short, concise letter that needs to contain standard elements and make specific points. In fact, no cover letter should ever be longer than one page. Listen to Lucinda's story.

When Lucinda Johnson was laid off from her job as the vice president of marketing for a now-defunct Internet firm, she was devastated. Lucinda was 42, and this certainly wasn't the first job she had held. In fact, until the dot.com crash, Lucinda's career had been on the upswing, climbing steadily from a Sales Representative with an insurance company to a leading position at what was, for a time, a very wealthy internet firm. This was the only job she ever lost.

All her life, Lucinda had climbed the corporate ladder effortlessly. She was promoted, recruited, and hired without having to do very much to advertise her skills to potential employers. Now she felt like a beginner all over again, faced with the challenge of job-hunting from scratch. What's worse, she felt she had a blemish on her résumé.

It had been many years since she'd written a cover letter, and this time, the process was quite different. Lucinda wondered how to fit everything she wanted to convey onto one page. She now had decades of experience to her name: what should she leave out, and what should she put in?

When she wrote her first draft, she didn't leave out anything. The letter ended up being three pages long, and it described, in detail, exactly what she had done at each business listed on her résumé.

She sent her letter to numerous potential employees, but heard nothing.

It wasn't until she turned to a professional recruitment advisor that she recognized her mistake – her letter was far too long. The advisor helped her cut it down to one page by identifying the parts of her career that were most important for the jobs she wanted.

She'd been sending out too much information, including past jobs and skills that these potential employers didn't care about. She didn't follow my cardinal rule: write a letter that meets the employer's needs and interests!

Soon after she sent out a revised letter, Louise was flooded with requests to come in for interviews. It wasn't long before she was appointed vice president of marketing for a major computer retailer.

The point is that it doesn't matter how successful your career has been or how much you've done until now. Your cover letter must fit onto one page. Many people think that potential employers will want to hear about everything they've done. They believe sheer quantity of experience is impressive. Not so! It's important to pick and choose only your strongest professional experiences, the ones that are related to your intended job, leaving out anything that could be considered extraneous.

Just as you need to demonstrate respect for a potential employer by dressing up for an interview and behaving like a professional, you must also show consideration for an employer's time by being concise in your cover letter.

We've already talked about how those applications pile up on an employer's desk. Think about how you'd feel if you had fifty letters to read. You'd be grateful to the writers who were concise, and you'd be irritated by those who weren't. Employers just don't have the time or desire to read long cover letters. If you ignore this fact, you're inviting rejection.

You have to prove your ability to be concise and home in on only what's most important. This is a highly prized skill in the corporate world. If you don't demonstrate it in your cover letter, your potential employer is going to think you don't possess it.

In our normal daily conversations, many of us have a tendency to ramble on and on. You might have experienced this during a face-to-face interview or even on a date: if you're caught off-guard by a question, the nerves can kick in and cause you to talk and talk and talk, saying everything except what you really want to say. It's simply human nature. When we're nervous or when we really want to prove ourselves to other people, we tend to talk in circles.

Likewise, if there were no limit on the length of a cover letter, we'd probably be tempted to turn in books detailing our professional experiences. No matter how successful we are, no matter how much we've done with our lives, there are always events and experiences it's best to leave out. Editing your letter so it includes only the most appropriate details is one of the best ways to ensure your application is a success.

Karen Silins has been a professional resume and cover letter writer for 16 years and is the acting president and executive board member of the Association of Online Resume & Career Professionals

For more information about writing a cover letter that will grab the employer’s attention, please visit: http://www.breakthrough-cover-letters.com/

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