[neilv]

I imagined receiving a pile of these cover letters, and having a negative reaction.

I'd feel they were wasting my time with bulk -- drowning out the meaningful, genuine ones, from people who invested in the communication -- as well as being from people who saw no problem in sending me what I'd consider a "fake" text that they didn't actually write themselves.

How about we try not to send LLM text that pretends to be written by a human?

And, if someone sends us text only pretending to have been written by themselves, we penalize that person?

[ep103]

I imagined receiving a pile of requests to write these cover letters, and having a negative reaction. I'd feel they were wasting my time with bulk -- drowning out my ability to meaningfully apply to genuine positions, by artificially raising the workload for each individual application -- as well as being from people who saw no problem in sending me what I'd consider a "fake" request that they didn't actually intend to read themselves.

How about we try not to request text that we pretend will be read by a human?

And, if someone requests text only pretending that it will be read, we penalize that person?

--

Note, I personally have no issue with cover letters, I am just attempting to point out that the parent's comment is not a compelling argument, so much as a rationalization that has decided to only consider one side of a two party situation.

[neilv]

Are you seeing companies requesting or expecting cover letters, in recent years?

Lately, I occasionally see a job application Web form that has place for a cover letter (text field, or file upload), but if it's there, it's almost always clearly marked optional.

I also more often see people on HN talking about not reading cover letters, and not having much time to review most applications at all.

If someone sends me a cover letter purporting to be written by them, I'd expect them to have written it themselves (not generated it with "AI", nor had another human write it for them), and to make it worthwhile.

[ep103]

As I said, I'm not against cover letters. I think they can be a reasonable tool that benefits both parties, if the interview process genuinely takes them into account and uses them honestly. I also think that the vast, vast majority of posts relating to interview processes in the tech industry on this website (and most others) show a staggering degree of lack of knowledge on how hiring works, and that interviewing in our industry is particularly poor given current normal processes.

But really, I was just trying to point out that the parent's comment didn't hold water.

[ghaff]

I think some of the divergence of opinion here is that a lot of people have primarily experienced filling out a form on a website--in which case a cover letter is pretty divorced from it's original purpose of going in an envelope with a resume.

On the other hand, an email to someone you know may be more important than your resume. For one job, I'm not sure if they ever ended up with my resume at all unless the business office wanted it for some pro-forma reason.

[DenisM]

I think most people wouldn’t mind writing a thoughtful letter if they knew that the recruiter will put thought into reading it. However most applications are discarded before that, which means one has to apply a lot to get a chance at hitting someone who will actually give you a chance by reading what you wrote. That in turn makes it impossible to put effort into every single one of them.

Have some compassion. Maybe try applying for jobs yourself and see how it looks from the other side.

[epistemer]

I think people underestimate how often their cover letter is a negative even without this.

I wouldn't doubt that often the cover letter causes people to be eliminated in about 5 seconds because it says the same meaningless bullshit that HR has read a 100 times already that day.

[noname3417]

What difference between that AI generated texts and almost the same text, but written by human? Both are just meaningless texts about nothing, to not leave cover letter field empty.

[ndr]

At the equilibrium employers will ignore the letters and find other ways.

If you want to trade your time/effort off applicants time/effort have them fill a tedious form.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Don't ask for bullshit and you won't get bullshit.

I am continually shocked by how willingly ignorant of this rule people are.