What to include in cover letters

This post, perhaps, is coming at a random time. But I’m not just talking about the letter/personal statement for getting into university. I’m also talking about the cover letters that many employers want alongside your CV, to gauge who you are as a person.

Ultimately, employers use your cover letter as an indicator to see if you have enough experience and truly care (i.e. to see that you have put the effort into the application), and whether you fit their specification.

Here are some things I always include in a personal statement/cover letter:

The basics (these are easy to get right, but very important)

• Spelling
• Don’t lie or embellish
  • In an interview, employers will often ask you about specific things you’ve written about. If you can’t back up your claims, you’ll shatter the good image they have of you. As a general rule, I only include things that I can say more about than what I’ve written.
• Say your skillset and experience
• Mention what you can bring to the employer – why you would be good for this role

Making you stand out:

• Good english and paragraph structure
  • This is not the same as good spelling. A well written cover letter reads smoothly from sentence to sentence, has a variation in paragraph lengths, and a new topic/angle to each paragraph. Depending on the sector, the importance of the coherence of a personal statement may vary; for example, I’d expect jobs in humanities subjects to have more stringent standards than a sector in, say, engineering, simply because writing is less important for the job in the latter.
• Good ordering
  • The order of paragraphs can impact the way your writing is received. I try to make sure I don’t waffle away, and keep the topics that are linked in the same paragraph. I also make sure I put the most relevant information close to the top of the letter; if whoever is reading it is not captivated by the first paragraph, they may not read on, and therefore miss really important attributes that are listed later.
• Thinking outside the box
  • This isn’t always necessary or applicable, but I try to include it where I can. The more the personal statement breaks away from mould of monotony, the more intriguing a read it will be. You want to captivate the employer. But be careful here – don’t captivate them for the wrong reasons!

After a successful application, you’ll often be asked to an interview. For preparation, I like to research as much as possible about the employer/organisation, and think of some questions to ask them, as well as coming up with answers to questions I think they are likely to ask me (this last one is really important; it saves you from scrapping around trying to think of good examples on the spot). I will also always re-read through my cover letter and CV, and try to see it through their eyes. They could ask about any of it, so it’s good to brush up on any topics you mentioned that may have become a bit rusty since you wrote the statement.

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