You may have heard bullet points suggested as a great way to write your resume. When hiring managers are skimming stacks of resumes, clear, concise bullet points of your credentials could be the difference between your application landing in the YES pile or the NO pile.

But could bullet points work for cover letters? If concise, easily digestible content is effective for resumes, then why not for a cover letter?

The biggest difference between a resume and a cover letter is that a resume is about YOU, and the cover letter is about THEM – that is, the employer. The cover letter should never be a narrative of your entire resume.

The job description should provide you everything you need to know about the employer and the person they want to hire. Use that information in your cover letter.

“If you write a really great cover letter that speaks to the job responsibilities and the job description, I engage instantly,” said Justin Smith, the director of new student orientation at Georgetown University.

Smith offered advice to job seekers at the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators annual conference last spring during a session called “Moving Forward: Winning Strategies for Job Search Success.”

If rewriting a cover letter to match your skills to the job description sounds tedious, Smith offered a trick that he used during his job search to make the process more efficient and effective.

Smith keeps a Word document with labeled paragraphs for each of his skills. For example, one paragraph explains his experience with new student orientation, one for crisis management and another highlighting his budgetary experience. As he acquires new talents, he adds paragraphs. The document is now seven pages long.

“When I go to apply for a job, I just copy the paragraphs, put them in, clean it up a little bit, and it matches the job description,” Smith explains. “You don’t have to spend tons of time writing a new cover letter every time; you can take some shortcuts in order to have a customized letter.”

Smith’s plug-and-play method can be efficient, but for it to be effective you have to avoid using too many paragraphs per letter, or having the paragraphs be too long.

According to Smith, four is the optimal number. Use four bulleted paragraphs no longer than four lines each. Each paragraph should describe why you are uniquely qualified for the job using words directly from the job description.

Smith suggests beginning each paragraph with a bolded word that summarizes the reason why you are uniquely qualified and then briefly back up the claim.

Here’s an example of a cover letter using these techniques for a job as a director of alumni relations at a small liberal arts college with mentions of online giving, homecoming planning, project assessment, managerial skills and budgetary responsibilities listed in the job description.

I’m qualified for this position for the following reasons:

Higher education experience. Having served three types of institutions with more than 12 combined years of experience, I understand the challenges facing small liberal arts colleges and how to engage their alumni.

Resourcefulness. Despite limited budgets, I’m able to use innovative, cost-effective techniques such as social media campaigns to connect with alumni and identify prospective donors.

Proven results. During my time as assistant alumni relations director at United States University, I helped launch a three-month-long, online-only campaign that raised $150,000 and introduced 250 new donors to the university. These were increases of 17 percent and 20 percent, respectively, compared to the school’s previous online solicitations.

[b]Managerial skills. [/b]Your college will benefit from my exceptional organizational and interpersonal skills as a manager. This was demonstrated while managing several concurrent projects at United States University, where I served on five committees, chaired the homecoming assessment committee, and directed a staff of three student interns.

A hiring manager can easily skim these bulleted paragraphs and match them with the job description, just like he or she would a resume. If you use Smith’s method, these paragraphs can already be written and easily selected from another document of other paragraphs that aren’t as applicable to the desired job.

This technique might not be appropriate for every job description. For example, a job description requiring strong writing or communication skills may need a more creative and fluid approach. But using Smith’s tips on pre-organizing your information and remembering that the cover letter should be about the employer is applicable for every job search.

Just because employers have their timesaving tricks to efficiently and effectively find talent doesn’t mean you can’t use a few of your own to help them identify you.

https://academicscores.com/2023/07/13/new-techniques-for-writing-cover-letters/