Have you seen such a thing as the perfect cover letter? If there is, what does it look like?
Well, let’s look at what such a resume cover letter is made of. It should be addressed to someone in the organization of interest; it mentions an opening in which you are interested; it includes your qualifications for the opening; and it finishes with a time-based action statement such as, “I will call your office to schedule an interview.” If your cover letter does not include at a minimum these basic components, it will not get you an interview.
Now then, it’s time to deal with the first challenge… how should the letter be addressed? You should know, if you want the “perfect” cover letter, your cover letter should not be addressed, “To Whom It May Concern” or “Dear Hiring Manager”. It should be addressed to a specific person in the organization. For the best results, this will be the person who will make the decision, the person to whom the new employee will report. Your Plan B is a key manager in the department or an employee that will send your resume on receipt to someone with decision-making authority for the position. Lastly, you can email your resume and cover letter to a manager in the HR department. This at a minimum will get your cover letter a brief reading before it gets passed on or scanned into into the candidate management system used by the organization.
If you know someone 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 mention their name in the email… “I received your email address from Ben Brackman, your VP of Sales.” An introduction like that can usually get your cover letter read and sent on to the hiring manager. Don’t immediately presume that you have no contacts at the organization. Check out social networking sites like LinkedIn or Plaxo which will let you search by firm. These sites will not only show current employees, but will tell you if an individual has previously worked at a company. There may be someone you know casually that left the company on good terms that can share with you a name and let you use them as a reference.
If you can’t identify someone at the company, how do you find the name and email address of someone in the firm? This can be easily accomplished these days with the amount of information available on the internet. All you have to do is spend some time on the organization’s website and a good search engine like Google. You can most likely find this kind of information on the “about us”, “management team”, “contact us”, or “news” pages of the company’s website. All companies have a pattern to the their email addresses (it can be 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 high degree of confidence. You can have a little challenge with nicknames; often “Rebecca” will go by “becky” in her email address. And, if this is an executive, often the mail server will be set up to forward emails addressed to either address through. On the occasion you send an email and it is bounced as undeliverable, you can try again with a different variation.
This approach will get your cover letter and resume in the door. In coming 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 candidates differentiate themselves in today’s competitive market. Candidates can find advice on how to overcome many job search challenges as well as resume cover letter templates and resume software to make the job search process more effective.
