cover letter

On Friday I was applying to jobs like a good little unemployed girl, when something inside my brain just -- for lack of a better word -- snapped.

Specifically, over cover letters.

"Hello! Saw your job opening for a Software Trainer online, and am attaching my resume beneath to join the thousands of other resumes you're no doubt wading through by this point. Allow me to achieve uniformity with the rest of the interested parties by stating that, despite the breezy and regrettably informal tone of this email, I am in fact very much interested in this position.

I've spent most of the last eight years in the field of education -- the teaching side, that is; we shan't count the learning side -- giving lectures to large audiences, heading classes, conducting seminars, and giving private classes for individual students. I have hands-on experience in the development and operational side of software production, a passion for customer satisfaction and troubleshooting, and a proven ability to learn quickly and adjust to new environments.

I also have a valid American passport, which allows me to travel anywhere I won't get shot on sight."

I've always been a bit dubious about cover letters, by far one of the most onerous facets of unemployment -- a near miss behind resume-writing, applying to jobs, and eating dry sourdough toast in one's pajamas at four in the afternoon -- because there is no part of the cover letter process that I haven't been part of. I've read thousands of cover letters in my time on the hiring side, and written several hundred for myself and for others as part of my employment search and my stint as an employment specialist at Career Planning and Placement, that snappily titled employment office affiliated with the Eastman School of Music.

In general, cover letters are professional courtesies extended to employers, an extra measure by which they can reject you out of hand without ever having to come face to face with what might be too charming a personality to withstand in person. A good cover letter combines equal part professional chatter, self-marketing, good grammar, flawless spelling, and expression of a confident, yet charming and humorous personality.

Unless it's for a financial institution, in which case the "charming," "humorous," and "personality" are all contra-indicated. Or Fry's, in which case the grammar, spelling, self-marketing, and professional chatter can be removed as well.

"...a relict of the lately defunct Excite@Home, where I programmed software for monitoring services and servers in case they went boom. These monitors were obviously low-level code that resided directly on the machines themselves, sadly not scaleable to the more endemic problems that eventually destroyed the company."

Out of all the requirements for a cover letter, it's the last -- the personality -- that's hardest to achieve. In the space of a single word, you can pop over the boundary from "confident" to "arrogant son of a flatulant monkey." "Charming and humorous" can come across as "unprofessional and inappropriate."

I can't count the number of painfully dull cover letters that I've read over the course of my career. On the other hand, I've encountered maybe three cover letters that actually interested me enough to inspire me to an interview. Okay, so it's usually very difficult to get an interview anyway, but a cover letter can inspire me to actually look at the resume with more than half a brain cell. If the base requirements for the job are there, I'll call the person in.

You have to understand, I'm not a good judge of character. I like pretty much everybody. If Jeffrey Dahmer had made me laugh by cracking a joke when I passed him on the sidewalk, I would've thought he was a nice young man, too.

"Despite the lamentably irreverent tone of this email, allow me to assure you that I am in fact greatly interested in a position with your company. I have a great deal of respect for your company and its services, as evidenced by the vast amounts of money that have been seduced out of my wallet by them in the past."

Back to the issue of cover letters. After having applied to several jobs using the tried and true formula of Professional No Personality, I finally snapped. "Why bother?" I asked myself. "Most cover letters never get read anyway. Most online applications aren't ever processed. Why not indulge a little and write the way you are?"

Yeah.

There are some companies out there that aren't going to call me in for interviews. At least I'll know why.

"Also, despite the best efforts of Japanese parents and a formal education, I am possessed of a lively sense of humor. To wit: how many mice does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

Imagine though, just for a minute, that you could actually write an honest cover letter. Not the type of honesty that makes you look good, but the type that's the absolute and unvarnished truth, the kind that lets you be completely frank and yet land you a job as well. A pipe dream, sure, but just think about that. No more anxiety about how you're presenting yourself, no more worries about how the other person will perceive it, no more hiding the desperation of unemployment behind a veneer of shiny, attractive self-confidence.

Imagine being able to tell an employer exactly what you think.

And then, get this, manage to get hired anyway.