[Darkstryder]

To me, a good cover letter is about being actually motivated to apply to a specific job and then simply explaining why.

AI doesn’t help because if you can articulate your genuine motivation as a prompt for an AI, you should just use the prompt as the cover letter which will be a lot more effective than using the AI-generated letter, as the AI will muddy your authentic motivation and diminish its impact.

[friendlyHornet]

> To me, a good cover letter is about being actually motivated to apply to a specific job and then simply explaining why.

Money. I want money. That's the reason I am applying to your job offer. I found a job offer that meets my skillset and I applied to it because I want an income.

But this isn't what you expect me to write, is it? You want something more, so I'm going to bullshit you so I can get the job that will allow me to get money

[yakshaving_jgt]

Ok, you want money. That's fine.

But what does the potential employer get out of the deal?

[emerongi]

A diligent employee who gets the job done in an efficient way because they want to get home to enjoy the money they just earned?

[yakshaving_jgt]

Ok. If you can explain in a little more detail how you get the job done and what qualifies your assessment of the relative efficiency, then you probably have the basis of a decent cover letter.

[vlod]

Oh come on, 95% of jobs are CRUDs:

- data is in the database

- get data from the database using ORM solution

- pull stuff from Backend (from Frontend), using REST/Graphql

- display it in a nice way using whatever the du-jour styling solution they picked.

This isn't rocket science. Do I really have to make some BS about why I'm "excited" about this company or industry in the cover letter.

Look at the number of applicants at a linked job posting. It's usually high 3 digit numbers, sometimes 4 digits.

Are they really going to read all this flowery cover letters about how you feel about their company.

[yakshaving_jgt]

Respectfully, I disagree.

[gampleman]

Did anyone ever get hired by answering the question of "Why do you want to work for us?" with "Because I need a pay check"?

Because that's realistically like 80% of the motivation for most job/candidate pairings. In my case the remainder is usually like 15% "and it doesn't require selling my immortal soul to the devil" and 5% "your tech/problem is vaguely interesting".

Given the above, I feel like a typical cover letter is really an exercise in spin.

[foldr]

A cover letter is also supposed to explain why the company should want you to work for them. But this question isn't usually posed explicitly, which I guess is confusing for some people.

Also, almost no-one is motivated so purely by money that they are equally interested in all jobs that pay the same. You can probably think of some reason why you would want to work at company X as opposed to any other number of other companies that may be offering similarly-paying roles.

[gampleman]

I don’t think the reason of “I already applied to all the better sounding ones, but they all ghosted me” is gonna win too many points either.

It really depends on the market. Sometimes there are great looking companies that you really would like to support because they somehow seem awesome to you. But you don’t always have that luxury.

> A cover letter is also supposed to explain why the company should want you to work for them.

For the generic cover letter that’s a reasonable thing to focus on. I’ve seen plenty of application forms that specifically ask the “why do you want to work for us” question (or even worse: “why do you want to work for us rather than our competitors?” which is even harder to answer, especially if it’s a tiny startup you’ve first heard of by reading their job post on LinkedIn).

[foldr]

>I don’t think the reason of “I already applied to all the better sounding ones, but they all ghosted me” is gonna win too many points either.

Not if you word it like that.

>I’ve seen plenty of application forms that specifically ask the “why do you want to work for us” question

That's what I'm saying. That's the formal question posed, but you can easily answer it by explaining why you'd be good at the role. "I want to work at X because I believe that I could make a significant contribution to Y given my Z skills".

[notgoliath]

Absolutely. While in an ideal world, everyone would love to land a job that perfectly aligns with their personal values and interests, the reality is different. The current market conditions are dictating a lot of our job search and choices in companies. A vast number of talented engineers are out of work due to circumstances beyond their control and applying for multiple jobs becomes less about passion and more about survival. While a personalized cover letter sounds great in theory, when you're trying to send out dozens of applications to ensure you can keep the lights on the idealism takes a backseat to practicality.