How to write a cover letter that gets read
A CV lists what happened. A letter can say why it was hard and what you decided — the nuance the document cannot carry. That is the whole job, and it takes three paragraphs.
The shape
One: what you are applying for, and who you are in terms of work done. Not a greeting, not a statement of enthusiasm. If the advert gives a reference number, quote it in the first sentence — agencies and large employers route by it, and a letter without it can land in the wrong pile.
Two: two or three things you actually did, chosen for what this role asks for, with the numbers as they appear on your CV. Not a summary of your career. The specific things.
Three: your own reason for wanting it, and a short close. This is the only part no other applicant could have written, and it is the part worth spending time on.
The opening that gets it rejected on sight
There is one construction to avoid above all others: the sentence that names the company and the job title together as an ambition.
It is the most recognisable machine-written line in circulation. It performs personalisation without carrying any — naming the company is not the same as knowing anything about it.
Also skip "I am writing to apply for". The reader knows. Start with something worth reading.
Never invent a figure
Every number in your letter must already appear on your CV. This matters more than it sounds: a figure you cannot defend is the one error you cannot recover from, because you will be asked about it in the room. Rounding thirty-one days up to "a month" or seven business units to "a dozen" are the sentences that catch people out.
When our tool writes a letter, every figure in it is checked against your CV in code before you see it. If one does not trace back, the letter is withheld rather than shown. That check is not advice we hope is followed — it is a gate.
What to cut
- Adjectives about yourself. Not dynamic, not results-driven, not passionate. Say what you did and let the reader conclude.
- Claimed admiration. "I have long followed your work" is unverifiable and usually untrue.
- Restating your CV. They have it. The letter is for what it cannot say.
- Anything past one page. Three compact paragraphs. More and it stops being read.
Tone
Professional, warm and hopeful. Warm means written to a person rather than at one — plain sentences, no throat-clearing, no corporate register. Hopeful means it ends looking forward rather than pleading. Neither means adjectives: warmth comes from how a thing is said, not from the word "delighted".
Do cover letters still matter?
Honestly: for most applications, less than people think, and less than your job title does. Recruiters filter on title and seniority before anyone reads prose, so a letter cannot rescue a CV that is not being retrieved in the first place.
Where it earns its place is the case a CV genuinely cannot handle — most often when your titles undersell the work you did. A CV has to carry the title your employer gave you. A letter does not, so it is one of the few places you can state the mismatch plainly, as a fact about the document rather than as an apology, and let the evidence settle it.
What about mirroring the job description's language?
We used to advise this and we no longer do. We went looking for evidence that matching an advert's exact phrasing improves your chances, and everything we found traced back to a company selling software that does it. It is unmeasured rather than disproven — but it is not something we are willing to tell you works.
What does hold up is the opposite risk: generic wording is what gets an application dismissed. Surveys across 2025 and 2026 put it at 49% of hiring managers dismissing CVs they suspect were AI-written, and 62% rejecting AI-assisted applications that lack real personalisation. Borrowed phrasing reads as exactly that.
CV-Shortlist writes one letter per role from your own evidence, checks every figure against your CV, and asks you for the one sentence it will not write for you.
Sources: 2025–26 hiring manager surveys on AI-written and unpersonalised applications; practitioner consensus on title and seniority filtering. Figures we could not verify are not on this page.