Monday, February 16, 2009

Reviewing Collegegrad.com for Cover Letter Advice

To start out, I have already written a draft of my cover letter for this class. So, with that being said, I have already done some research about cover letters on my own. There is one section of the collegegrad.com website that stood out to me: the sample cover letter section. This section stood out to me because it's easy going website to website reading about what you SHOULD do while writing your cover letter. It's more difficult to find real life examples of cover letters that you can read to make sure you have a good basis of how your own cover letter show flow.

There was a part of the collegegrad.com website that I disagreed with about writing cover letters and that was the information the website gave about the postscript technique. I will say first, before I critique this method, that I am not a professional at writing cover letters, so this advice could very well be good advice and I am just not accustomed to seeing it in use. The website said that it would capture your reader's attention if you put a "P.S." at the end of your cover letter and then followed the "P.S." with an interesting fact or atribute about a previous accomplishment. This, to me, seems like it might seem as if you are bragging on yourself a little much. It seems like the "P.S." goes beyond just discussing how you would be good for the job to just making yourself big-headed. I personally believe that the person reading your cover letter might be turned off to the fact that you think so highly of yourself, like you are flaunting it in from of that person.

I found it interesting that collegegrad.com claims that most employers do not look at your cover letter first, they look at your resume. I found this interesting just because I have always been told to make sure my cover letter did not have any gramatical errors and that it was written in the correct format. I was told that a cover letter is what an employer truly focuses on because it contains the highlights of why you would make a good candidate for the job. After I read this article on collegegrad.com, it makes sense that employers might just jump straight to reading your resume because it ultimately contains all the information on where you have worked. Employers often rate previous experience highly when deciding which candidate to select for a job. So after reading the article, it makes sense to me that an employer might read your resume before reading your cover letter. After all, your cover letter sometimes contains more information than is relevant for an employer to determine, initially, if you are a possible candidate for a job.

The cover letter checklist is definitely something that I found helpful. The checklist was helpful because you can just glance at your cover letter and make sure you have completed all the items that are on the checklist. After you complete the cover letter checklist, you know you are not leaving anything technical out of your cover letter.

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