Cover Letter 2014

Cover Letter 2014 ©

By

Michael Casey

I was talking to somebody about cover letters today, I can see the irony as I talk to you, as I won’t be needing one myself any more. However Pitch Letters are a different thing, and I do expect to have to do some of those.

So what about Cover Letters, they are part of the job search process, without one you may not get a job, or it may swing it for you. So you have to write a cover letter. I looked at my old cover letter today and realised it was too long.

A CV should be two pages and no more, the cover letter that goes with it should be just one side. HR people and job agencies are always in a hurry, they won’t even look at a multipage opus. Into the bin it will go, literally or on their PC.

So what do you do? You iron out he rough spots, and raise the molehills to mountains, and vice versa. The Cover Letter is your chance to shine, it’s like your Facebook home page. Or your paragraph on the Dating Website. It’s all about you.

So you say what you were great at, you never say “I was a bit rubbish at X Y Z” followed by but. Your Butt would be kicked out before you even start. It’s a Positive Only piece, it’s your chance to get a great job, or any  job and be able to afford to pay the rent or buy a new set of golf clubs.

So tell them what you are great at, and think differently about yourself, put yourself in their shoes, the Saint Augustinian Way, and Sell Yourself. You may not think  that visiting the sick is anything special, its your good deed. This proves to an employer exactly where your heart is, he may be a hospital visitor himself, yes him in the £2000 suit.

You may be embarrassed by your kindness but it lets the employer know just what kind of person you are. Your Community Actions do make a difference.

In your job it may have been you who trained all the new people, and wrote the basic Bible for the job you all did. Nobody else could have been bothered, but you did it. So put it in the Cover Letter, you have Training Experience, so boast about it.

You may speak several languages, and the office staff may have poked fun at you for it, but it’s you who speaks to all the truck drivers when they arrive from all over Europe. Tell everybody as the Billy Joel song goes, you may even overlook it, because it’s only a few minutes. But only you can do it, so boast about it.

Write a list of everything you can do, and everything you do do, then write a flow chart of it, and join the dots with words. If you sell your house you put everything down in a positive way, so on a Cover Letter you do the same, but about yourself.

I am fat and have white hair, this describes me. In a Cover Letter it becomes I am distinguished looking with silver hair and a strong athletic build.  Ok the athletic may be stretching it too far. You are painting a picture, a pretty postcard showing just how great you are, so you get that job.

All this has to be done on one page, it’s a sprint and the winner gets the job, so don’t be shy give words a try.