Today’s Plan:
- Resume Review
- Fundamentals of Cover Letters
- Homework
Cover Letters
The ABO entry for “Application Cover Letters” [pp. 36-41] identifies 3-4 purposes for your cover letter:
- Introduce you as a candidate with the skills that can contribute to the particular organization
- Explain what particular job interests you (or why you are interested in the advertised position
- Illustrate via specific examples qualifications in your resume that match the position
- Signify your desire/availability for an interview (this is a phatic closing gesture)
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing things in that order. But you might. It is tricky–you are playing a kind of meta-game with a reader (since the rhetorical purpose of your document is super obvious: GIVE ME A JOB). The game concerns how skillfully/subtly you can perform within this charged situation. You want to consider tone–how do you come off as someone who is hard-working and professional while also not sounding too formal and/or stiff? Unless the job advertisement and your online research suggests that they are a formal environment. Essentially, how good are you at reading the room?
Here’s what the cover letter shouldn’t do: it shouldn’t just summarize your resume. It should select one or two skills from the resume and flush them out, providing context and details. Bottom line: TURN A GREAT ACCOMPLISHMENT INTO A STORY. Don’t tell me you have experience researching grants, tell me how you partnered with the ARC of Weld County to identify and research, using both the State of Colorado and the Foundation Center databases, 13 specific grants for non-profit organizations focused on children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Or how you worked with a team of designers to produce flyers for both print and digital distribution for 8 upcoming events. Mock ups of these flyers are available on your website. Whatever. Aristotle reminds us that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end–a problem, your solution, and a measurement/assessment of the results.
The cover letter is your opportunity to tell a story about the best work you’ve done. Caveat: the best work that is relative to the position. It is an opportunity to show a few awesome things (the resume is your opportunity to tell them about all the things).
The three examples in the ABO book aren’t bad. But I feel like they could be better. They could provide more details about what someone has done (in some places they feel a bit too much like someone is narrating a resume).
But the ABO advice for the final paragraph is fine. Let’s look at those final paragraphs.
Let’s look at a few sample letters.
Homework
Your last assignment for the semester is to produce a resume and cover letter for a specific job or internship.
You will see the following assignments in Canvas:
- Week 15: Resume Draft
- Week 15: Cover Letter Draft [due by 9:00am]
- Week 16: Final Job Materials [due Tuesday, Dec 7th at midnight]
