[kqr]

There are good cover letters and then there are cover letters that are a waste of time. From what I can tell, this tool generates mostly the latter. It's basically just reformatting the resume and job description, producing an inferior version of both.

A good cover letter

- reveals some of the personality of the applicant (I once had a software engineer describe themselves as caring and thoughtful -- that was a nice touch to complement their resume which lists technical achievements)

- gives the recruiting team a sense of passions, priorities, and style of cooperation (again, beyond the technical which is on the resume)

- lets the organisation know a little about the reason for switching jobs.

Of course, it says nothing about whether the applicant is any good at the job, but it can give a sense of whether this person is someone the team would enjoy hanging out and working with every day. I haven't verified it empirically, but I believe cover letters have been signalful for me in the past.

[_p4lt]

The reason I said "mostly" a waste of time, is I didn't want to rule out the possibility of swaying an employer with some special reasons or explanation of how you could be a good fit that wasn't covered by the usual bare facts in the resume.

But to me that always seemed like a rare exception, they would have to pay attention and I would have to have something special to say. The great majority of cover letters I have written were because it was required by the process. Honestly this tool would probably be useful for that sort of fluff, so good on them for making it, but better to just have cover letters as a special case than the rule I think.