[nasalgoat]

Sorry, when you're applying to a dozen jobs a day, it's hard to put that personal spin into it.

I know you think you're a special snowflake that's different from every other company out there, but looking for a job is a grind. A tough one. Why make people dance and sing even more?

[JohnFen]

> Sorry, when you're applying to a dozen jobs a day, it's hard to put that personal spin into it.

True, it's a lot of work. But plenty of people (myself included) manage it.

I'm not going to say that anyone is wrong for not writing cover letters, of course. But there are lots of people making hiring decisions that put a lot of stock in good ones, so it makes logical sense to provide one.

[carlosjobim]

> True, it's a lot of work. But plenty of people (myself included) manage it.

Generally what the person recruiting ate for lunch and the state of their bowel has ten times the influence on the success of your application than any amount of time you spend writing a cover letter. It's all random, and you can't know beforehand if your application will arrive at a serious recruiter or not.

[danaris]

"I did it, so everyone should have to do it" is a mindset that denies the possibility of progress to something better.

[JohnFen]

The mischaracterizes what I'm saying. I'm not saying everyone has to do it. Nobody has to do it -- it's your choice. What I'm saying is that doing it can give you an advantage.

[hotpotamus]

You know, I'm more on the side of the worker than capital a lot of the time and I despise much of modern hiring processes, but a cover letter doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I would think you could template it significantly and still avoid making it too boilerplate.

Like start with some bio - as a young child, I took everything apart to see how it worked (much to my parents' chagrin). From that I learned to see the beauty of a mechanical watch ticking away, and I see a similar beauty in a RabbitMQ server ticking away messages, directing them where to go and seeing the inside of the system at work - it's been a lifelong interest of mine.

That part can pretty much stay the same. Then write a paragraph or two about the job. You might not know much but try and find a connection. Like if it's a bank, talk about how you'd like to know more about how money moves over the modern global infrastructure, or if it's some service you've used, talk about how it was helpful. If it's hard to find a connection, then you can say I've got some relevant skills, but I don't know much about your industry and I'd like to learn more.

[danaris]

OK, now do that a dozen times a day, five days a week.

For weeks.

Months.

Can you still bring yourself to do it at all, let alone find something meaningful to say about each one, after all that?

[ImPostingOnHN]

Someone applying to jobs dozens of times per day for months (so over a thousand applications), without bothering to research where the job is, much less write a cover letter, strikes me as working harder, not smarter.

If they were to apply to fewer jobs, less frequently, and more personally, putting more effort into each, they might not need to be searching for months, or making so many applications where it's clear to the company that they don't care whether they get that job or 1 of hundreds of others.

Maybe think of it like phishing vs. spearphishing. Or sending "hi" as an opening line on a dating app, vs. tailoring it to the person. The latter gets a better response rate per interaction.

[danaris]

Ah, yes; I'm sure you're much smarter than all the people who have struggled to find jobs over the last few years. Surely, their problem is their own incompetence, and not the incredibly hostile labor environment that decades of Gordon Gekko-style management have wrought, treating human beings as cost centers to be minimized, rather than as the reason we do any of the work in the first place.

[ImPostingOnHN]

It's simply a different strategy. If you're getting better results working harder on a scattershot, impersonal approach that broadcasts to the recipient that you aren't particularly interested in them, much less suited for each other, more power to you. That goes for jobs, dating apps, phishing, etc.

In all those cases (okay, not phishing), I got better results the other way myself. I also didn't reach out to recipients that struck me as having the type of culture/personality you described when I read up on them. So there's a selection bias there, too, but one that works for me.