Cover Letters

About Cover Letters

A cover letter is a hiring manager's first sense of how you think on paper, and it carries more weight than candidates usually believe. Resumes flatten you into bullet points; the cover letter is where you write a paragraph that sounds like you, names the role specifically, and explains what you've actually done. The hiring managers who read these letters are scanning for two signals: that you've read the job description carefully, and that you can write a clear page of professional English. The templates in this category are organized so that the most common shapes — general application, recent graduate, career change, executive — appear first, with industry-specific variants below for when you want a more targeted starting point.

For more on how to write a letter in this category — the conventions, the pitfalls, and the specific rules of tone that apply — see our full Cover Letters writing guide.