You’ve written your resume, formatted it and polished it to a shine. The document, a beauty to behold, is ready to be sent to every company on earth, or at least the five that are hiring. But hang on! You now need to painstakingly craft a cover letter to show why you are the perfect candidate for this particular role in this specific company.
An arduous task, but necessary because most managers (83 per cent, according to a ResumeLab survey in 2020) say it’s important and expect one. If you want to curse someone for this – always a therapeutic thing to do - curse Dutch Boy Paints, who first issued the deadly directive “submit resume with cover letter” on Sept 23, 1956, via a job ad in the New York Times.
Other companies quickly followed suit. So everyone and their cousins began writing cover letters, and over the years, the recruiter’s job became hell.
Then artificial intelligence happened. AI was delegated the task of reading cover letters, checking if they’re addressed to the right person in the right company with the right spelling; looking for keywords; matching skills with the job; and evaluating “passion for the company” based on adjective quality.
Where a recruiter would expend four hours, two coffees, and 18 blasphemies to read 50 cover letters, the machine would do it quietly in 12 seconds, no coffee, no expletives expended.
But if large language models can read efficiently, they can write exquisitely. Candidates began using AI to address the right person; spell the company name correctly; insert appropriate keywords; highlight (or invent) skills that match the job; and employ searing adjectives to demonstrate undying passion.
With AI producing exactly the cover letter AI had been trained to admire, everyone should have been happy. But corporations are not.
The Economist says they no longer find the cover letter effective. Managers feel that AI, by working for the other side, has cheated and wrecked the system.
A good cover letter no longer signals genuine effort – perversely, the better the cover letter, the more it signals lack of human effort.
According to the research they cite from Yale, the link between a well-crafted cover letter and an employer’s likelihood of calling you back has fallen by more than half.
In this gloomy scenario, what should you, the jobseeker, do? You should continue reading because I’ve got some brilliant suggestions for you.
The hiring manager seeks sincerity, effort and passion, evidenced by the lack of AI-writing. But still detected by AI-reading because they’re not going to start reading the letters themselves. Therefore, your letter needs to be so not-AI-written, it stands out to AI like a nightingale among crows.
Here are three ideas to transform your letter into that nightingale, and ensure you’re shortlisted for an interview: (1) Take the bull by the horns; (2) Disguise AI use; (3) Be brutally honest (yes, I’m serious).
Let me cover each:
1) Take the bull by the horns
Write just one sentence; “I really want this job, but I believe it’s wrong to use AI to write my cover letter – and if I write anything more than this, you won’t be sure I didn’t.” No intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is required to conclude a human wrote that.
2) Disguise AI use
Enerate the letter using AI. Then carefully replace the keywords with non-keywords. Then generate typos, not subtle ones, but blatant howlers that stand out to the AI reading. Go for stuff like: “You will not find a gooder candidate than me” and “I hardly work on weekdays and weekends”. Finally, add an unnecessary ‘human’ detail, for example, “I love watching Tom and Jerry cartoons… especially in the toilet.”
Now this is critical. You must start the letter with “I don’t believe in using AI: so this letter may not have the right keywords. In fact, I believe it’s unethical to use ANY help, so I’ve turned off ‘spelling and grammar check’. Please excuse these lapses.”
3) Be brutally honest to stand out from the AI-slop
Focus on two areas: Make your purpose less-than-noble: “My purpose is simply to make money, money, money.” And tell them about your real work ethic, not the noble one AI would invent: “I love work-life balance and see from the role description I’ll get plenty of it here.”
Try each of the three ideas with a different company you’re applying for and let me know (at info@jestbusiness.com) what works. I’ll analyse the millions of letters I get (using AI, of course) and in a subsequent article, write about what works best for what kind of company, job and recruiter.
Paddy Rangappa, an ex-CEO, is a humour writer, co-host of the podcast Jest Business, and corporate coach on humour for leaders (www.jestbusiness.com)
