Cover letters: short, specific, or skipped

I used to write three-paragraph cover letters. They got me nothing. I now write two-sentence ones, and they outperform the long version by every metric I can measure.

The case against the long one

Recruiters open the cover letter file in roughly 30% of applications, per the data from the ATSes that report it. Of that 30%, the median read time is 14 seconds. A three-paragraph cover letter is about 200 words; you read 200 words in roughly 60 seconds at scan speed. The math says only the first third of your cover letter is getting read.

Worse: the LLM-generated three-paragraph cover letter has a recognisable cadence. It opens with “I am excited to apply for the [role] position at [company]”; the second sentence pivots with “With my background in...”; the third paragraph closes with “I would welcome the opportunity to discuss...” Recruiters now reliably identify these. They are not weighted positively.

The two-sentence cover letter

Sentence one: name the specific thing you noticed about the company that made you apply. Not the boilerplate from the careers page — something specific. A blog post by an engineer there. A product decision they made recently. A market position you find interesting.

Sentence two: the one thing you've done that's most relevant to the role, with a number.

Example, for a backend role at a small fintech:

I read the post on your switch from Aurora to PlanetScale last month — the bit about query-cost regression testing was the most concrete piece of writing on database migration I've read this year. At my last role I led the migration from Postgres to CockroachDB across a 4TB transactional workload, with zero customer-facing incidents over the cutover.

That's 65 words. The recruiter reads all of it. It's also unambiguously written by a human — no LLM fluently produces “the bit about query-cost regression testing” without being told to.

When to skip entirely

If the application page makes the cover letter optional and the company is large (1000+ employees), skip it. At that scale, the cover letter is rarely read at all, and the time saved compounds across volume. Use the time on the next application.

If the application page makes the cover letter required, write the two-sentence version. Don't pad. A short cover letter that's read beats a long one that's not.

The salutation question

Don't. “Dear Hiring Manager” is generic enough to feel formulaic; using a specific name when you don't actually know who's reading is worse. Open with the substantive sentence. The format is a note, not a letter.

What to do if you're using AI

Three rules:

1. Cap the output at 80 words.Most cover-letter generators don't self-cap, and over-write by default.
2. Feed the model a real, specific input.Paste a relevant blog post or product page from the company. Models can't fabricate “something specific you noticed” without it.
3. Read the output. Edit one phrase. Make it sound like you. The single edit is what stops the recruiter from pattern-matching it as machine-written.

I run our cover-letter generator on these rules. Output is short, specific, and human-feeling. If the user wants it longer, we ask once. Never twice.