10 Reasons Why You Need a Cover Letter

Although I covered many of the reasons why you need a cover letter in my article titled, Do You Really Need a Cover Letter, I would like to revisit the subject, and also tell the story of a conversation that recently took place between my manager and me. First, let’s go over some of the reasons why you need a cover letter.

1. Although many companies don’t require that you submit a cover letter, some will, and there should ultimately be no reason why you can’t or shouldn’t produce one. You are potentially limiting your own advancement by not doing this one simple thing. 
2. Companies aren’t the only organizations that sometimes require cover letters. Anything you may want to eventually apply for, like graduate school, will likely require that you write something about yourself with regards to your academic and professional capabilities. You should get used to writing about yourself, as you will eventually need it, especially as you progress in your career.
3. Your cover letter paints the picture of your resume. For many, a resume is represented as a bulleted list of information written with incomplete sentences. Your cover letter will showcase your technical, leadership, teamwork, and multitasking capabilities in full and complete sentences. 
4. A cover letter is another tool in your marketing tool chest. A resume is synonymous with a product datasheet, while a cover letter is synonymous with a commercial for the product. What is the product? YOU! Your cover letter and resume are marketing tools to help you get a job, get into graduate school, and can open up many other opportunities.
5. Once you have written one cover letter, you can continuously make revisions to it for improvement. It takes upfront effort to create marketable content for your resume, which then lends itself to making a great cover letter. For resume and cover letter help, check out my articles here and here.
6. You can use your cover letter for annual reviews. The subject material of your cover letter already lends itself to producing a well written annual review for the company you work for since you’re already writing about yourself, your responsibilities, and accomplishments.
7. It’s the best way to introduce yourself when trying to get your resume out there. This goes for both internal and external job applications. As a matter of fact, the story I will tell you shortly is about a job that I applied to internally. Reaching out to recruiters and hiring managers directly shows initiative, drive, charisma, and ability to communicate. Along with a great cover letter, exemplifying these qualities can be the difference between getting your foot in the door and being glanced over.
8. It’s the best way to introduce yourself, period! Your cover letter is basically a script! You can read directly from it, dissect portions of it, create shortened versions, and can easily rewrite it to match your spoken, rather than written, tone of voice. Personally, my cover letter is the source of my elevator pitch, interview introduction, meeting introduction, etc. Of course, I don’t recount the entire letter for each instance. Instead, I pull bits and pieces depending on the particular situation. An incredible amount of detail can be pulled from just a few paragraphs.
9. It will help you become a better writing and speaking communicator. It’s not uncommon to get the jitters before speaking in front of a group of people, large or small. The more you practice what you preach, the easier it will become to get your message across painlessly and effortlessly. The more you practice anything, the better you will become at it. This is especially true for writing and speaking.
10. I think one of the most important reasons why you need a cover letter is because it will help you understand what you do even more. Most of us, if not all of us, have had days, weeks, months, hell, even years, when we were like, “What the hell do I even do at work,” or, “What is my purpose and function at work?” Marketable, content filled resumes and cover letters force you to think about everything you do and have done/accomplished, and then they force you to write those things down. Not only is this true, but the process also forces you to put these thoughts together in a clear and concise manner, such that your audience gains a meaningful understanding. Realistically, if you don’t understand what you do, how can someone else understand it if you’re trying to explain it to them. This, in turn, also helps you to become a better communicator. As previously stated, practice makes perfect. The more you practice writing, speaking, and recounting your responsibilities and accomplishments, the better you’ll become at those activities. You will likely also get better at performing those responsibilities, and even have greater job satisfaction, when you have a purpose and understand your roles completely. When describing your roles and responsibilities, you will appear more convincing and confident, drawing greater attention from your audience. Since you will more clearly understand what it is you do, it may more clearly define what it is you actually want to do as well. This realization can have an overwhelmingly positive effect on your future decisions and overall mental health.

If these haven’t convinced you that you need a cover letter, then maybe a little story of a recent conversation that took place between my manager and me will.

To provide some background, I was looking for a career change early in 2020, and put myself in the job market to find my ideal job. Throughout 2020, I ended up interviewing for multiple positions, and I received multiple offers. The position I ended up taking happened to be an internal position I applied to. How did I receive this position? I looked through my company’s internal job posting system, found my ideal job, reached out to the hiring manager, interviewed, and had a new job within a few weeks. However, before I did all of this, I took my external resume and cover letter, and turned them into an internal resume and cover letter. When I reached out to the hiring manager, I reached out with an email using the content of my internal cover letter, and I attached my resume to the email. 

Now for the big kicker. In a recent conversation with my manager, my manager told me he was ready to hire me after reading my cover letter. Let me repeat. My manager was ready to hire me onto his team, simply after reading my cover letter. Now, I don’t want to say that the interview was simply a formality, and that my manager had already made up his mind about hiring me purely off my cover letter, but, and this is a big but, what if I had never reached out with my cover letter to begin with?

Before making my final point, I would also like to state that, of course, I was at a significant advantage over my competition since I was already an employee of the company. It’s much easier to transition an employee internally than it is to bring a new employee in from the outside. However, if I had never taken the initiative to prepare an email from my cover letter, and had just relied on the job application system to push my resume through, there is a good chance that my application may have been delayed, or even glanced over. My father used to say that it really doesn’t take much more to go the extra mile to stand out. This is how you should always be thinking about everything you do. Go the extra mile and make a cover letter!