[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".