[bllguo]

well adding the visual element just introduces another source of bias.. and even if we set that aside, depending on the position it may be selecting for an irrelevant skill

cover letters are terrible anyway. the signal to noise ratio there must be comical.

[agumonkey]

what are better recruitment ideas replacing cover letters ? (honest question)

[Psychlist]

What worked for me, after my boss just put up a stock ad and got hundreds of replies then decided that they couldn't cope and handed the problem to me. First spam all the applicants and say terribly sorry there's been a transition in the team and now I am in charge. Enclose copy of new ad, in email emphasise that I have tier CV and want ~100 words explaining what they understand about the job:

- ask for a very specific thing in the cover letter. In our case, which version of the specific IDE they were familiar with. - specify that we care about relevant skills, and having the legal right to work here. nothing else.

Of the 50-odd responses who survived a 10 seconds each filter (ie, did you answer the question), I skimmed the CVs and picked 10 I liked and 10 more I thought would be ok. I did this via a 5-bucket sort - as I read each email I dragged it into a numbered folder. Then I created folder 1a,1b and put 10 in each. Sure, that's about an hours work but it's easier than doing an online test and trying to make it non-gameable.

Interviews were a five minute chat then we dumped them in front of a computer with our development setup on it, and a series of programming tasks. Starting from "this button. Make it so when the user clicks it a dialog pops up saying 'click'" and going up to "there is a memory leak in this ~100 line command line program. Find it and fix it". They were asked to talk me though what they were doing, and while most problems followed each other from the same based, they started with a "perfect" solution to the previous ones at each step so that we didn't deviate too far.

I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the "brown M&Ms" question was, and how predictive the series of programming tasks was.

https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9

[agumonkey]

very interesting thanks a lot

[bllguo]

I wish I had answers. I don't - I just know that cover letters aren't it.

I've been on both sides of hiring at this point. On the applicant side, I have never seen any indication that anyone has ever read my cover letters. Writing them is a chore. And though my sample size is very limited, I have never had success with bespoke cover letters/cold emails/etc.; the time has always been better spent on reaching more people.

On the hiring side, I've read a few cover letters. Nothing has ever stood out. I read it over once and that's that. Honestly I feel like it can only hurt you. What kind of powerful, moving statement could you possibly write that would persuade someone to give you a chance when you otherwise had none? I'm sure it's happened, but to force people to write these things at the cost of millions of man-hours, just to cover this absurdly rare and mythical case? And on the other side, there are so many things you could do in a cover letter that would give a _negative_ impression. Maybe the tone is inappropriate, or there are inadvertent grammatical errors, or it's written poorly, and on and on and on. Just more exposed surface area for the naturally critical interviewer's mind to attack.

[mattrp]

I have a pretty long resume at this point (23 years now in the workforce)... I use the cover letter to try to summarize a few takeaways using very short sentences. It seems like if you don’t hit at least one positive talking point within the first 5 seconds of reading they will never bother reading the rest of the resume. I once actually did step into recruiting at a startup I worked at once. We had about 25,000 emails come in for 20 positions and the recruiting team was going insane trying to sort them. I wrote a few quick filters to draw out interesting resumes but I ended up reading nearly half the resumes... over a weekend. I get that reading resumes is tedious but I just have so little sympathy for these people who have so little attention to detail / ability to structure their work passing judgement on my ability to conjure some algo.

[agumonkey]

Often I think all these (cover letters are not the only artefact) are just postural items to see who's gonna make the effort no matter what use it has. A kind of faith leap.

[ProZsolt]

I would do it for one or two companies. If you can be hired by the first company of your choice, you don't really need it.

What about providing a proper job description? Without it your company is a "maybe", till I talk to an engineer who can describe the job properly. Would it make sense to write a cover letter after that?!

[roland35]

I have seen some companies askna few "short answer" style questions as part of the application, which I liked!