5 Qualities Of Successful Cover Letters

Hiring managers almost always read the cover letter of a candidate before they move on to the resume. If the recruiter spots a winning cover letter, they automatically get attracted to the applicant and even gets excited about the resume attached to it.

Writing a superb cover letter is the best trick to develop an unconscious bias in favor of you in the hiring manager’s mind before they even see your resume. With the right cover letter, you will have your employer wanting to recruit you, without even knowing the credentials on your resume.

We get to read hundreds of cover letters a year at Resume Mansion, and over the years, we have spotted some traits of client cover letters that make them successful. If you want to create a winning cover letter for yourself, incorporate these 5 qualities into it:

A winning cover letter is always friendly and confident

When you have a conversation with someone in person, you need to be mindful of your language, tone, manner, and even nonverbal cues. If you want the person to like you and think of you as a confident, competent person, you will make certain adjustments to your tone and manner to convey those traits.

Consider your cover letter as a conversation you have with the hiring manager. Create your letter in such a way that they would know you are a well-adjusted, confident, trustworthy person. You don’t need to be a writing pro to do this. Simply using a friendly and polite tone would do. Instead of writing a lengthy letter, convey your ideas concisely, using a few selected sentences.

A good cover letter talks about the position and stays on topic

You want the hiring manager to know how smart, interesting, and fun you are, which blends just right into the company culture. But writing a cover letter that’s all about your personality will not get you the job. Your cover letter should always be about the position, and how your personal qualities and expertise match the expectations of the position.

Give the hiring manager an incentive to hire you by explaining how your specific set of skills combined with your unique qualities would make you the perfect fit for the job at hand while going great with the company culture.

Successful cover letters use simple and easy-to-grasp language

You don’t need to impress the hiring manager with your writing skills unless you are applying for a job in creative writing. You should always use clear, concise, and easy-to-read sentences in your cover letter. Lengthy sentences that do not quite make sense or that are confusing will be a disadvantage for you.

Read your cover letter from top to bottom and identify any sentences that don’t make sense, have subject-object mishaps, or aren’t related to the overall message. Replace those with clear sentences that don’t confuse the reader.

Winning cover letters always answer four questions

If you really want to write a winning cover letter you should ensure that your cover letter provides answers to these four crucial sentences:

• Are you prepared to handle the daily requirements of the job?
• Do you really want the job?
• Will you fit in and adapt to the company culture?
• Will you contribute to helping the company grow instead of doing the bare minimum?

An efficient cover letter knows when to stop

No hiring manager has the time to read a two-page cover letter, no matter how good the writing is. A good cover letter would convey a compelling message in or under 300 words. Unless your employer provides a word limit for the cover letter, it is always wise to stay well under 450 words and make sure that your cover letter is contained within one page.

One easy way to reduce the length of your cover letter is to highlight all the words that you think are unnecessary and try to rewrite your cover letter by omitting those.