The Cover Letter Flying Kick
The Cover Letter is a Strategic Template
Cover letters accompany a resumes/cv. When applications were solely based on email and snail-mail, the structure of a cover letter was fairly simple. The old school rule was: keep it to one page.
With online recruitment systems and services like LinkedIn, the rules and structure have changed. Not only do you need a cover letter that is a one page document, it needs to be framework that helps build an online presence to virtually represent your history, voice, and ideas.
Consistency is very important because you can't control where a person decides to begin reviewing your documents. Maybe they use LinkedIn? Maybe they start with Search Associates? Maybe they go straight to Carney Sandoe?
As always, the medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964.)
A few years ago I was striking out left and right on getting first interviews. I finally did get a series of interviews with a very good school. Unfortunately, after eight weeks of talking and a fully paid trip to their campus, I did not get the job.
The director of human resources and I got along well. I was exhausted from the process, but I wanted feedback. The director sent me a PDF and said, “This is what we [HR People] see when we view your LinkedIn.”
I didn’t realize that the HR world use different LinkedIn features to avoid browsing. For speed and efficiency, they use a feature that creates a formatted PDF of a profile. If they pay for this service, they get even more features.
I used the PDF she sent me, and filled in gaps, corrected mistakes, and made certain that the printed version looked complete and matched my cover letter template.
With three more iterations (this took about two weeks), the HR director emailed me and said, “Your LinkedIn looks great. However, your recruitment profile looks like this [Image a really bad version of your resume and sentences that look like Swiss cheese].”
So I went into my online recruitment profile (I did this for multiple agencies) and repeated the same steps as I did with LinkedIn. I made every system match, using the cover letter as the core template, and then customizing based upon the various requirements.
That process took another two weeks. I proof read over and over again. I created PDFs of my online profiles to simulate the HR experience. I sent these to friends to check for language and look for errors.
Eventually, I had a resume and cover letter that were a near word-for-word match to all my online recruitment profiles. I left a two paragraph space in the cover letter to allow for job targeting.
Job targeting refers to writing to the specific job. For example, if I were applying for a position that was 75% admin and 25% teaching, I would use those two paragraphs to outline my qualifications. If I were going for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) job, I would use those two paragraphs to emphasize my CTO skill set.
The rest of the letter was generic and designed to work with online recruitment search algorithms.
The outcome of this work was a shockingly high increase in interviews, and six invites to come to campuses for recruitment visits and final interviews.
I also noticed that after I aligned everything, I started choosing different jobs. Meaning, I focused my time investment and went for jobs that were more appealing to me.
The process of getting the cover letter and resume streamlined should help you focus on your priorities and give you those initial talking points needed to move beyond round one of recruitment.
This work requires a significant time investment. I would say you need about 40-60 hours of work to get all your materials and online recruitment profiles configured, tested, and revised. Testing yourself will not work. You need people to help and provide truly critical feedback.
“Yeah. That looks great. I really like the tie in your photo.”, said the worst friend ever.
“Ok. So I have no idea what this means. Your resume is really messy. The fonts are all over the board. You need a full rebuild. He are some ideas.”, said the best friend ever.
Liu Kang
To execute the Flying Dragon Kick in Mortal Kombat I,
Forward, Forward, High Kick
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Why is this SubStack called, Pancake on a Stick?
Pancake on a Stick is the single funniest story I have ever heard in my life. In about a year from now, the event will be reenacted and recorded. I named the SubStack after the story, because every time I think of the name, I smile and laugh. This helps with my writing and tone, and makes me always remember the most important things in life.
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Most social media is dead to me, but you can find me on LinkedIn and Youtube.
LinkedIn (A bastion of boredom but mostly on mission)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdeprato/
Email
info@tonydeprato.com
My video series on Expat Recruitment is BORING but useful Listen or Watch and you can master this process.