Can there be such a thing as the perfect resume cover letter? If so, how is it put together?

Okay, let’s examine what such a cover letter contains. It is addressed to an individual in the company at hand; it calls out a position in which you see a fit for yourself; it lists your qualifications for the position; and it concludes with a statement such as, “I will call your office to schedule a follow-up.” If your resume cover letter does not have at least these basic elements, it will never get you any results.

Now then, we must discuss the first challenge… to what person 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 individual in the company. For the best results, this will be the employee making the hiring decision, the individual to whom the newly hired employee will report. Your next choice is a key manager in the department or someone that will likely forward your resume on receipt to someone who will find your qualifications of interest. Lastly, you can email your resume and resume cover letter to a manager in the human resources function. This at least will get your resume cover letter a quick look over before it gets passed on or placed into the resume management system used by the company.

If you have a colleague employed at the company, see if you can’t get their permission to receive and forward on your credentials. Or, get a contact name and email address from them and ask if you can use their name in the email… “I received your contact information from Sally Brown, your VP of Sales.” An introduction like that will often get your resume cover letter read and sent on to the appropriate manager. You can’t presume that you have no entry points at the company. Check out networking sites like LinkedIn or Plaxo which will let you 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 someone you know quite well that left the firm on good terms that can give you a contact and let you use them as a reference.

In the absence of knowing someone at the firm, how can you find the name and email address of someone in the organization? This is fairly easily accomplished these days with the amount of information published on the internet. All it takes is to spend some time on the firm’s website and a search engine like Google. You can most likely find the necessary information on the “about us”, “management team”, “contact us”, or “news” pages of the company’s website. Most employers have a pattern to the their email addresses (it’s usually something like firstname.lastname-at-company.com or firstinitial+lastname-at-company.com). If you have the pattern used for email addresses and the name of your contact you can construct their likely email address with a high level of accuracy. You can often have a little challenge with nicknames; occasionally “Rebecca” will go by “becky” in her email address. If this is a senior level person, sometimes 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 returned undeliverable, just try again with a different variation.

This approach can get your resume cover letter and resume in the door. In later discussions we’ll talk about the things that 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 competitive market. Candidates can find approaches on how to overcome many job search challenges as well as cover letter templates and resume software to make the job search process more effective.

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