It's Essential to Tailor Cover Letters

Dean Zimmerman shared the following advice today with recent grads, but her tips apply to students and seasoned alumni as well. Use her advice to make your cover letters count!

We wanted to share some useful feedback that we are hearing from employers about what makes an online application successful.

The main piece of feedback is to make sure that you are addressing your cover letters to specific individuals whenever possible. We try to obtain contact information and it is viewable in the posting itself. Sometimes a contact is not available and, in that case, you may address letters to "Dear Hiring Committee", "Dear Hiring Attorney", "Dear Sir/Madam", "Dear Recruiting Committee", etc.

Whenever possible you also want to tailor the content of the letter to the specific position and employer. Employers tell us that letters that demonstrate an awareness of their organization and/or position are much more compelling and will stand out. The first paragraph of the letter is a great place to show you've done your homework about the employer (major cases or deals, recent news about a successful case or deal, client names, practice area names, etc.). This doesn't need to be long-just a sentence or two.

Throughout the body of the letter you want to make sure you are sharing information about your skills or experiences that would be useful to this particular employer or this particular job. Once again, there may be limited information in the posting, but always try to google the employer, see if they have a website, see if they have alums, see if there is anything distinctive about their work that you want to show a connection to in your letter. Use language that they include in the posting itself when you describe your experience.

You may well find that you have a couple of template cover letters, but do go through each one before uploading it to a particular application to see if you can tailor it more. I know this is time-consuming, but tailored letters are far more likely to make a positive impression.