Cover letter examples

The seven letters

Pick the one closest to your situation. The career change and graduate letters are the two that differ most in structure; the rest share a shape.

• Software engineer

  A backend engineer answering an advert that names a specific problem, with one system described in depth and two skill gaps disclosed before an interviewer can find them.

• Product manager

  A letter built around a decision that was reversed by evidence, because a changed mind is the only cheap way to show product judgement in writing.

• Project manager

  A delivery programme that slipped and recovered, with the misdiagnosis left in, and a constraint mapped across from one industry to another.

• Marketing manager

  A retention problem diagnosed by reading cancellation reasons, with the result bounded so the reader can attribute it. The letter doubles as a writing sample.

• Customer service

  A personal first-contact resolution figure set against the team average, an escalation habit described plainly, and shift availability in the close.

• Career change

  A teacher moving into data analysis, stating the reason in one sentence, the gaps in a paragraph of their own, and the level being applied for.

• Graduate

  A final-year student using a project with a real client and a two-year part-time job, instead of the adjectives most graduate letters run on.

When a cover letter is worth writing, and when it is not

Most advice about cover letters assumes the answer is always yes, which is not true and costs people hours. Many applications never have the letter opened: high-volume portals often store it as an attachment nobody clicks, agency recruiters frequently forward a CV with their own summary, and some employers deliberately screen on the CV alone. Writing a careful letter for those and skipping it for the applications that would have been decided by it is the worst available split of effort.

Write one when

• You are changing career or sector. Your CV shows a job title that does not match the vacancy. Unanswered, that becomes the reader's own explanation, and it is rarely the generous one.
• The application is speculative. There is no advert, so there is nothing for the CV to be matched against. The letter is the entire application and the CV is the appendix.
• Something in your history needs one sentence of context. A gap, a short tenure, a relocation, a return after leave. One plain sentence closes a question that would otherwise sit open through a screening call.
• The advert names a specific problem you have solved. That is the one case where a letter can outrank a better-matching CV, because you can point straight at it.
• You were referred, or you are writing to a named person. A letter to somebody who will actually read it is a different object from a letter uploaded to a portal.
• The employer asks for one. Not sending it is read as not following an instruction, whatever the letter contains.

Skip it, or keep it to four lines, when

• The form marks it optional and caps it at a few hundred characters. Write the four lines that matter and spend the saved time on the CV, which is definitely being read.
• You are applying through an agency that rewrites submissions. Ask the recruiter what they actually forward before writing anything long.
• Your CV already answers the advert point for point. A letter that restates it is two copies of one document.
• You would be sending the same text you sent to the last six employers. A generic letter is not neutral. It gives a reader evidence that the application is untargeted.

How to use these pages

1. Read the breakdown before the letter. The paragraph analysis is the reusable part. The letter itself is an illustration of it.
2. Take the shape, write your own content. Opening that names their problem, one piece of evidence with a constraint and a result, a disclosed gap, a close that asks for something specific.
3. Use your own figures. Every number on these pages is invented. A figure you cannot source is a figure you cannot defend in the interview it earns you.
4. Keep the short version. Most applications go through a form with a limit, and a letter written to the limit reads better than a long one cut off mid-sentence.
5. Send the letter and the CV as separate files, named with your own name, unless the advert asks for one document.