Dear Hiring Manager: Is the Cover Letter Dead?

Fabulous points.

And so w- we've talked about, you know, the art of the cover letter.

You know, we've also have discussed on SHRM's All Things Work podcast and newsletter about, you know, different approaches when it comes to degrees and skills first hiring.

You know, we're hearing more people ta- more companies taking that approach, or structured, AKA standardized interviews, and rethinking those job requirements from the start before they put in that, you know, job posting or when they're reimagining a role.

So why are these approaches are potentially better suited to a world where anyone can use AI to generate a polished application, well, let's say cover letter and resume within seconds?

Yeah.

And, you know, if you've worked in recruiting long enough, you know that there's always a nuance, right? There's always a, "This works great for some people, but not for the others." And I, I jokingly say, like I only trust recruiting experts who mention the nuance.

So I wanna just emphasize a little nuance out of the front to say that I feel like those systems work great for companies where you hire maybe four kinds of people.

So let's talk about a consulting firm.

A consulting firm usually has a entry level role, a manager, a director, and a most senior manager, right? They hire every single person into those roles with some kind of specialty, and that's basically the depth of the roles.

In those spaces, because you have enough data to define what good means, I think skills-based hiring and AI approaches are highly applicable and something that you should be implementing 100% right now because you know what good means.

You have a very clear definition of what your highest performers do, and you can work backwards into a system that helps you understand that.

If you hire 50 roles and 39 of those are unique job descriptions, I don't know if those same systems are going to help you or just become a false proxy for success because they're helping you define a finish line that you actually don't know is good or not.

You talked about how the cover letter, you know, would be very valuable for roles where, you know, maybe somebody, uh, is applying to be a writer of some sort, especially if they're writing like blogs or creatively, um, or even content marketing kind of style.

I think I, I understand your point and it makes a lot of sense 'cause you wanna see their writing style.

Um, how would that differ from, you know, providing a writing sample?

So let's use McKinsey as an example, right? I don't believe that those consultants are writing letters of interest to people, right? They get a lot of their business from networking, building relationships.

Um, and so I might use a writing sample where I ask them to write an email communicating urgency to my client.

"We have a 24-hour timeline where we need to get a response from this client.

Please write the email that you would send them to communicate urgency." That's gonna tell me a lot about that person's ability to be professional, to communicate clearly, to be concise, right? And it's also going to show how they relate back to the client, and all of those are 10 times more useful for me to determine if you can be successful at my company than a beautiful cover letter that tells me about the incredible opportunity that you'd like to have at our organization.

[laughs]

[laughs] I think we all felt a little, I think some of us maybe even like, uh, twinst- or like were triggered by that a little bit.

[laughs]

Well, and I, I think what you just tapped on, right, is the same thing that happens to the job postings when we cringe.

The same thing happens in that cover letter, is they all sound the same, and all of us know we need to be different.