Cover Letters: Then and now
I was told the other day that my communication style (as interpreted by cover letters I sent) had changed dramatically for the better over three years. Thanks for that! So I thought I’d share in hopes of helping someone else do the same.
I started work at Tapstream as of this January. Thanks to my strong (apparently?) portfolio and active-ish Github account, the interview was beers after work to see if I was tolerable to be around, followed by a short technical test a few days later, just to make sure I wasn’t completely lying.
Ben, the co-founder of Tapstream, is a serial entrepreneur of sorts. I can’t keep them straight, but he’s been involved in several companies in the last three years. One of them is/was called Blitware.
Yesterday, he mentioned to me that he found a cover letter that I had sent Blitware three years ago, when I graduated university and was looking for work. Three years can mean a huge difference in skills these days, but mostly he was impressed, he says, just how different my communication style was then and now, which I found really interesting.
I’m not one to be easily embarrassed, so I’m going to go ahead and post both of those for anyone to see. Here’s my cover letter from 2009. Note that it did get me an interview, but not a beers interview, and not a job either:
Hello,
My name is Adam Bard, and I’d like to apply to the Web Developer position as advertised on the VIATec website.
I have been working part-time as a freelance Web Developer for the past two years, while attending UVic full-time in the Electrical Engineering (Digital Signal Processing specialization) program. I graduated this April, and have been a full-time freelancer since then; in fact, I was the sole developer on Douglas Magazine’s new website (Joomla-based), on which I see you have posted. Prior to this I was a PHP developer at Sparklit Networks Inc. http://www.sparklit.com/.
I have experience with standard LAMP development, and have used Django in one paid project, which admittedly was never launched. I have developed a time-tracking and invoicing system in PHP/MySQL at http://www.tasksy.com/, although the online version is disabled and I use a local copy to serve my invoicing needs. I also have experience in C at Sparklit, and in a major design project in satisfaction of my degree. I have used Subversion, CVS at Sparklit and utilize Mercurial and Git for version management in my freelance projects.
I’ll leave it to you to judge my written communication, but I feel that freelancing has improved my ability to convey information, often to non-technical contacts.
I can be contacted at any time at 250 555 1234, or at this email address. Please find attached my resume.
Cheers,
Adam
Looking back, that’s really how all my cover letters looked. This is how lots of people write, because it’s what they were taught. It’s not communication, it’s a dressed-up form letter.
This sort of cover letter is for HR, not for communicating your value directly to the people who want to pay you. It’s a list of bullet points: degree, experience with a, experience with b, etc., and it would be better expressed as such.
There was a recent post about this sort of thing on HN yesterday, as it happens.
Touching on your experience in your cover letter is important, but only so far as it relates directly to your prospect. Don’t stretch too far, or someone might get bored.
A few years later, when I was ready to move on from the company that eventually did hire me, this is what I wrote:
Hi There,
I found the “Big Data Wrangler” listing on Stack Overflow, then the “Web Developer” one on your site. Perhaps you gave up on finding someone with Hadoop experience, or perhaps they’re different positions; if that’s the case, maybe I can talk my way in.
My full-time job is at a company called ASL Environmental Sciences, which has offices at Keating X. It’s a good job, but I’ve solved a lot of the problems I was hired to solve, and I wouldn’t mind the commute reduction anyhow. One of my functions at this job is to produce software to process big datasets – the instruments that ASL manufactures have sampling rates of up to 2Hz and are often deployed for over a year. I’ve written software relating to this in C, MATLAB and Python, depending on the use case.
Besides that, I do a lot of web development work on the side, as a freelancer and in side projects. Django has been my framework of choice in the past; the most major projects I can point to are http://resumatic.net, and the major (10 sub-apps!) Django intranet I wrote for my current company. Most recently, I launched http://www.ladieschoicevictoria.com/, which is written in Clojure and uses MongoDB, just because I can. I’ve tinkered in a lot of languages and frameworks, including Node.js and Rails. If you haven’t guessed already, I read Hacker News every day. Also I know SQL.
When it comes to systems administration, I’m not a DevOps, but I can configure Nginx in a pinch, and I run my own virtual hosts when I’m not using Heroku. I’ve never used Hadoop, but I think it would be super keen.
My whole CV is available online at http://www.linkedin.com/in/adambard or http://resumatic.net/adambard/, and I’ve attached a pdf from the latter. I also have an active Github account at https://github.com/adambard.
Cheers,
Adam Bard
The difference is subtle upon analysis, but it’s obvious just reading the two back to back that it seems as though different people wrote them.
I don’t know what it was about the second one that had Ben so impressed (it’s not the first time he’s mentioned it), but here’s what I like about it.
- It tells a story about a person, and at least attempts to present technical skills in an organic way.
- It addresses the broad points of the job posting. These are usually not too hard to pick out.
- It’s honest about the points in the posting that I don’t hit head-on, without being too wishy-washy about it.
- It has some personality, I like to think.
- I left the excruciating details of my experience out. That stuff is for your resume and your Github account.
- Mostly, I communicated that I know what’s valuable to the reader, not that someone taught me how to write a cover letter in 3 paragraphs.
- I’m told that it’s much more confident and competent.
I don’t know how much of the above I just made up to justify an offhand compliment someone paid me yesterday, so let me close with the one takeaway that I know is true: Your cover letter is not only the first representation of yourself you get to make, but an opportunity to demonstrate that you know just how much bullshit is the right amount.
Hint: it’s not very much.