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What Your Resume Cover Letter Says About You

A cover letter is the first thing a company that is hiring is going to read about you. For this reason, you want to keep it precise, direct and to the point. A cover letter should never be more than one page long and should only contain a couple of paragraphs. These paragraphs should not cover half the page either. Most people get bored after the first five sentences in a paragraph. Instead, the cover letter should say something about you that you are going to bring to the company if hired.

What Not to Write in a Cover Letter

It should be mentioned that everyone wants to put themselves out there in the best light possible. Nobody writes a cover letter and submits a resume to a company that they do not want to work for. For this reason, people tend to boost their abilities and what they are going to bring to the company more than what is realistic. You should never embellish your abilities. Many who read cover letters can tell if you are being honest or not and you do not want to come off as a liar.

Stay Positive

It is important when writing the cover letter to be positive about your attributes without embellishing. You need to let the company know all of your positive traits that would make you a good fit with the company. This should simply be your skills or personality traits that you would offer to them. If you are good with numbers, put this in your cover letter that you are submitting for an accounts position. Are you great with people? Then you should include that aspect of your personality when applying for a customer service position.

Give a Clear Picture of Who You Are

This can be difficult when you are trying to be brief, but choosing the right keywords can make it much easier. Words like “energetic”, “fresh” and “innovative” are words that those doing the hiring are going to clue into to get an idea of who you are. It is possible to be very verbose without using pages of text to make a point. In fact, the most compelling statements are those that use fewer words rather than more. If you can say it in one sentence, do not take twenty sentences to make the same statement about yourself.

If you use these three tips when writing a cover letter, you are going to get that call for an interview. The cover letter is the first impression you are going to leave the company. Just as you would not dress messy and be scattered at an interview, your cover letter should not be messy and scattered. Have another person read your cover letter and let you know if there are any areas that they do not understand. This can help you to have the perfect cover letter you can send to companies you want to work for that are going to give you a better chance at getting the position.