About Cover Letter Lab
Cover Letter Lab is an independent site about one thing: the written message you send with a job application, or send cold when there’s no application to attach it to.
We’re not a product, an agency, or an affiliate storefront, and we’re not connected to any writing tool or job platform. There’s nothing here to buy.
Why a whole site about cover letters
Because it’s the part of applying that people are worst at, and the reasons are structural rather than personal.
You’re asked to write a formal document, in a genre you’ve read almost no examples of, about yourself, to a stranger, with no feedback loop — you never find out whether it worked. Under those conditions almost everyone defaults to the same safe, empty register: I am writing to express my strong interest in the position advertised on your website. It’s not that people can’t write. It’s that nobody has shown them what a good one looks like.
So this site shows complete letters, not fragments. Reading three good ones does more than reading thirty tips.
What we think
Specificity beats enthusiasm. The paragraph about how passionate you are about the company’s mission is the weakest one in most letters, and readers discount it entirely, because everyone writes it. One concrete sentence about the actual work — the problem in the posting you’ve solved before, the thing you’d want to ask about in week one — does more than three paragraphs of admiration.
Don’t invent the enthusiasm you don’t have. If you have no particular feeling about the company and you’re applying because the role looks good and the money is right, that’s fine and extremely common. Write about the work. Manufactured admiration for a mission you’d never heard of last Tuesday reads as manufactured, and it falls apart the moment an interviewer asks a follow-up.
It’s not a resume in prose. Restating your history in paragraphs is the second most common failure. The letter’s job is the thing the resume can’t do: connect your specific experience to their specific problem, and say something a bullet point can’t.
Whether it’s read varies enormously. Some hiring managers read every letter. Some companies discard them by policy. Expectations differ by country, industry, and seniority — in some markets a letter is mandatory, in others faintly unusual. You’ll find confident statistics online about what percentage of employers read them; those numbers aren’t sourced and we won’t repeat them. The honest position is that it varies, a good letter takes ten minutes, and occasionally it’s the thing that gets you the interview.
On AI
It comes up in every conversation about this now, so, plainly: using an AI assistant to draft, restructure, or tighten a letter is normal and we’re not going to tell you not to.
Sending one you didn’t rewrite is a different thing, and it’s self-defeating rather than immoral. The entire value of a cover letter is the judgement in it — which of your experiences matters here, what you noticed in the posting, what you’d ask about. A tool that doesn’t know your history can’t supply that, so what it produces is fluent, plausible, and empty. Readers have now seen a great many of those and they’ve learned the texture.
We’ll show you where the tool genuinely helps and where you have to do the work yourself.
How we write
Direct, a bit wry, and willing to tell you to cut a paragraph. Complete example letters, all hypothetical and labelled as such. No invented statistics, no claims about what any named company does with your application, and everything written originally for this site.