Which shape of cover letter you need
There are four situations and they want four different opening moves. Picking the shape first is most of the work — the generator does the rest.
- Last reviewed
- Length
- About 6 minutes
- Scope
- Maintained, not published. Corrections welcome.
Most cover letter advice is about tone, and tone is the last thing to worry about. The first thing is shape: a letter answering a posted advert, a letter arriving with nobody expecting it, a letter that leads with the name of the person who suggested it, and a letter that has to address a change of field before the reader supplies their own explanation. Those four open differently, ask differently and close differently, and picking the wrong one produces a letter that is well-written and slightly beside the point. This page is about choosing between them. There is no template gallery here and there is not meant to be: the shipped version of ClearHire had two template catalogues that disagreed with each other, which is worse than none, so there is one generator and this is the page that tells you what to ask it for.
Where it applies.
You are answering an advert
The most common case and the simplest. The reader knows why you are writing, so the opening does not have to justify itself — it has to be specific quickly.
Nobody advertised anything
A speculative letter has to acknowledge that it may be badly timed, because pretending otherwise reads as not having checked. Saying so costs nothing and buys the reader's attention.
Somebody suggested you write
The referrer's name belongs in the first line, where it does its work. Halfway down the second paragraph it is a detail; at the top it is the reason the letter is being read at all.
You are changing field
Address it early and plainly. A reader who notices the gap before you mention it spends the rest of the letter building their own explanation, and it is rarely the generous one.
Writing the one nobody asked for
An unsolicited letter has a harder job than any other kind: it must justify its own existence in the first line. What works is specificity about them rather than about you — something they are doing, a problem you can see, a reason it is this company and not forty others. Anything that reads as a template will be treated as one.
How it works.
Pick the shape before you write a word
Advert, speculative, referral, or change of field. Everything else follows from this, and it is the one decision that cannot be fixed by editing.
Decide the one thing you want remembered
A letter is remembered as a single claim, so choose it deliberately rather than letting the reader pick. Something with a number in it if you have one, written the way you would say it out loud.
Say whether you know anything real about the company
If you have something specific and true, one sentence is enough. If you do not, leave it out entirely — a generated compliment reads as generated, and every reader has seen a hundred of them.
Keep it to three or four paragraphs
Greeting, why you are writing, the thing you want remembered, and a close. A fifth paragraph is almost always the one that repeats the resume.
Read it aloud before you send it
Anything that sounds unlike you probably is. The letter's job is to make a conversation likely, and a voice the reader cannot match to the person in the interview works against that.
Worked illustrations.
Constructed to show the shape of the decision, not reported cases. The figures are illustrative.
A speculative letter that opened like an advert reply
It read as though a posting had been missed, which made the writer look careless rather than enterprising. Naming the situation in the first sentence — no advert, may be badly timed, happy to be told so — turned the same letter into a reasonable approach.
A referral buried in paragraph three
The person who suggested the letter was the reason it would be read, and their name arrived after the reader had already decided how much attention to give it. Moving it to the first line changed nothing else about the letter.
Questions people bring here.
- How do I choose which shape of letter to write?
- By how the reader came to have it. A letter answering an advert, a letter nobody asked for, a letter following a referral and a letter explaining a change of field are four different documents, and the opening move differs in each. Getting the shape right is most of the work; tone is the smallest part and the part most advice is about.
- Does anyone actually read cover letters?
- Some readers do and some never will, and you cannot tell which in advance. That asymmetry is the whole argument for writing a short one: it costs you fifteen minutes and it is the only place you get to explain something a resume cannot carry — a change of direction, a gap, a specific reason for this role.
- How long should it be?
- Short enough to read in under a minute — three or four short paragraphs. A letter that restates the resume at length gets skimmed to nothing, and the parts worth reading are lost in it. If you cannot say the useful thing in four paragraphs, the useful thing has not been identified yet.
- What should the first sentence do?
- Give the reader the reason this letter exists. For a referral that means the name, immediately, because it changes who is reading; for an advert it means the specific thing about the role that made you write. What it must not do is announce that you are writing to apply, which the reader already knows.
- Should I mention salary or availability?
- Only if they asked. An unrequested salary expectation anchors a conversation that has not started, and availability belongs in the reply to the first email rather than in the letter. If the advert explicitly asks for either, answer it plainly and briefly — ignoring a direct instruction is a worse signal than any number.
- Is it worth writing one for a field change?
- It is the case where it matters most. A resume in a different domain gives a reader nothing to connect, and the letter is the only place you can say what transfers and why the move is deliberate rather than a retreat. Without it, the reader constructs their own explanation, and it is usually less generous than yours.
Small things that help.
- Leaving the company name out is a real choice, not an unfinished letter. The result addresses the team rather than pretending to know one.
- One claim, not four. A letter listing everything you have done is a resume with worse formatting.
- The close should be easy to say yes to. "Happy to talk whenever suits" asks for less than "I look forward to discussing how I can add value".
- Never let a generator invent a company fact, an achievement or a reason you admire someone's work. Everything specific should be something you typed.
- A cover letter cannot rescue a resume the reader has already discounted. If the resume is the problem, fix that first.
- There is one generator and one set of shapes, deliberately. Two catalogues that disagree is how the previous version of this product ended up giving two different answers to the same question.
Written to be corrected. If something here is wrong, say so and it changes.