[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?!