Can there be such a thing as the perfect resume cover letter? If there is, what does it look like?

First, we should discuss what such a cover letter contains. It may be addressed to someone in the organization of interest; it calls out an opportunity in which you see a fit for yourself; it details your qualifications for the job; and it finishes with a time-based action statement such as, “I will contact your office to schedule a follow-up.” If your resume cover letter does not have at a minimum these basic elements, it most likely will not get you any results.

All right, let’s deal with the first challenge… to whom should the letter be sent? Let me tell you, if we’re striving for the “perfect” resume cover letter, it should probably not open with, “To Whom It May Concern” or “Dear Hiring Manager”. It should be sent to a specific appropriate employee in the organization. Ideally, this will be the manager who will make the decision, the individual to whom the new employee will report. Your Plan B is a key manager in the department or someone that will send your resume on receipt to someone who will find your qualifications of interest. Last but not least, you can email your resume and resume cover letter to a manager in the personnel department. This at a minimum will get your resume cover letter a brief reading before it gets passed on or dumped into the resume management system used by the organization.

If you know someone that works at the organization, see if you can’t get their permission to receive and forward on your resume. Or, get a contact name and email address from them and ask if you can mention their name in the email… “I received your contact information from John Smith, your Customer Services Manager.” An approach like that can usually get your resume cover letter read and sent on to the hiring manager. You can’t presume that you know no one at the organization. Check out popular internet sites like LinkedIn or Plaxo which give you the ability to search by employer. These sites will not only display current employees, but will tell you if an individual has previously worked at a company. There could be a colleague you know well enough that left the firm on good terms that can give you a name and let you use them as a reference.

If you can’t identify someone at the company, how do you come up with the name and email address of a person in the organization? This is fairly easily accomplished these days with the wealth of information published on the web. Spend some time on the organization’s website and a good search engine like Google. You can usually find the information you want on the “about us”, “management team”, “contact us”, or “news” pages of the company’s website. All organizations have a pattern to the their email addresses (it’s usually something like firstname.lastname-at-company.com or firstinitial+lastname-at-company.com). If you have the pattern used for email addresses and the name of your contact it’s easy to construct their probable email address with a high level of accuracy. You can have a little challenge with nicknames; often “Sandra” will go by “sandy” in her email address. Also, when this is an executive, the mail server will be configured to forward emails addressed to either name through. If you send an email and it is returned undeliverable, you can try again with a different one.

This approach will get your resume cover letter and resume in the door. In subsequent discussions we’ll talk about the key elements that should be in your resume cover letter so that your resume gets more than a few seconds of attention.

MyExecutiveCompass is an employment portal dedicated to helping job seekers differentiate themselves in today’s crowded market. Candidates can find approaches on how to deal with many job search challenges as well as cover letter templates and resume software to make the job search process more effective.