eCareer Guide International Jobs

Is there such a thing as the perfect cover letter? If so, how would you know it?

All right, we should discuss what such a cover letter has in it. It can be addressed to a person in the organization you want to join; it mentions an opening in which you see a fit for yourself; it lays out your qualifications for the opening; and it finishes with a time-based action statement such as, “I will call your office to schedule a follow-up.” If your cover letter does not include at a minimum these key components, it will not get you a call back.

Now then, let’s talk about the first challenge… how should the letter be sent? Okay, if we’re striving for the “perfect” cover letter, your cover letter should probably not be addressed, “To Whom It May Concern” or “Dear Hiring Manager“. It should be sent to a specific appropriate person in the company. In the ideal situation, this will be the individual who will be hiring for the position, the individual to whom the position will report. Your next best bet is a key manager with influence or someone that will likely forward your resume on receipt to someone who will find your qualifications of interest. Last but not least, you can email your resume and cover letter to a contact in the personnel department. This at a minimum will get your cover letter a brief reading before it gets passed on or placed into the resume management system used by the organization.

If you have a colleague that works at the organization, see if you can’t get their permission to receive and forward on your resume. Or, get a contact name and email address from them and ask if you can use their name in the email… “I received your email address from Sally Brown, your Director of Marketing.” An approach like that can usually get your cover letter read and forwarded to the right department manager. Please don’t presume that you know no one at the organization. Check out popular networking websites like LinkedIn or Plaxo which allow you to search by employer. These sites will not only indicate current employees, but will tell you if a colleague has previously worked at a firm. There could be an acquaintance you know very well that left the employer on good terms that can give you a contact and let you use them as a reference.

If you can’t identify someone at the firm, how can you determine the name and email address of a person in the organization? This is fairly easily accomplished these days with the amount of information available on the internet. All it takes is to spend some time on the organization’s website and a search engine like Google. You can usually find the necessary information on the “about us”, “management team”, “contact us”, or “news” pages of the company’s website. Most companies have a pattern to the their email addresses (something like firstname.lastname-at-company.com or firstinitial+lastname-at-company.com). When you have the pattern used for email addresses and the name of your contact you can construct their likely email address with a certain degree of accuracy. You may have a little challenge with nicknames; often “Rebecca” will go by “becky” in her email address. If this is a senior level person, the mail server will be configured to send emails addressed to either name through. On the chance you send an email and it is bounced as undeliverable, you can try again with a different variation.

This approach should get your cover letter and resume in the door. In subsequent discussions we’ll talk about the key elements that should be in your cover letter so that your resume gets read.

MyExecutiveCompass is an employment website dedicated to helping job seekers differentiate themselves in today’s crowded market. Candidates can find approaches on how to deal with many job search challenges as well as cover letter templates and resume software to make the job search process easier.