16 Jul 10 How to Write the Eye-Opening Resume Cover Letter

Have you seen such a thing as the perfect resume cover letter? If yes, what does it look like?

Well, let’s look at what a great cover letter contains. It should be addressed to an individual in the company at hand; it should mention an opportunity in which you have interest; it lists your qualifications for the opening; and it ends with a next step such as, “I will contact your office to schedule a follow-up.” If your resume cover letter does not have at a minimum these key components, it most likely will not get you a return phone call.

Okay, let’s deal with the first challenge… to whom should the letter be addressed? You should know, if the goal is the “perfect” resume cover letter, your cover letter should never 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 participate in the selection, the individual to whom the position will report. Your next best bet is a key manager with influence or an employee that will likely forward your resume on receipt to someone who will find your qualifications of interest. Last but not least, you can send your resume and resume cover letter to a contact in the human resources department. This at a minimum will get your resume cover letter a brief reading before it gets passed on or dumped into the candidate management system used by the company.

If you know someone employed at the company, see if you can’t get them 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 contact information from Ben Brackman, your Director of Marketing.” An approach like that will usually get your resume cover letter read and forwarded to the appropriate manager. You can’t presume that you have no entry points at the company. Check out networking websites like LinkedIn or Plaxo which give you the ability to search by employer. These sites will not only show current employees, but will tell you if an individual has previously worked at a company. There could be a colleague you know quite well that left the firm on good terms that can give you a contact and allow you to 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 company? This can be easily accomplished these days with the wealth of information published on the internet. You should spend a little time on the company’s website and an internet search engine like Google. You can usually find this kind of 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 it’s easy to construct their likely email address with a certain degree of accuracy. You can have a little challenge with nicknames; occasionally “Robert” will go by “bob” in his email address. If this is a senior level person, sometimes the mail server will be configured to send emails addressed to either address through. When you send an email and it is bounced as undeliverable, you can try again with a different variation.

This approach will get your resume cover letter and resume in the door. In later discussions we’ll talk about what should be in your resume cover letter so that your resume gets more than a few seconds of attention.

MyExecutiveCompass is an employment portal dedicated to helping candidates differentiate themselves in today’s difficult market. Candidates can find advice on how to deal with many job search challenges as well as cover letter templates and resume software to make the job search process shorter.

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