Cover Letters In A Week

Write A Great Covering Letter In Seven Simple Steps

Pat Scudamore, Hilton Catt

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781473609426
• eBook ISBN: 9781444185812
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Sunday: Understand the importance of first impressions and the common mistakes people make Monday: Ensure your application is taken seriously with a cover letter that is concise, complements your CV and is targeted to the job you have applied for Tuesday: Discover how to style and structure your cover letter with advice on forms of address, etiquette, fonts, margins and the importance of 'white space' Wednesday: Design your cover letter to engage your audience and overcome the competition for advertised jobs Thursday: Design a speculative cover letter to approach the invisible job market Friday: Learn how to address cover letters to agencies and recruitment consultants Saturday: Learn from your applications, whether successful or not, and develop your writing style for the future

Today we are going to look at designing a cover letter for attacking the invisible job market:

• jobs which aren’t advertised

• jobs which for one reason or another employers keep to themselves.

There is no way of accurately measuring the size of the invisible job market but it’s fair to say that it is:

• big

• bigger than most people think.

One way of accessing the invisible job market is by sending out speculative mail shots either by post or in email form. Designing a cover letter for this purpose is what we will be looking at today. The rules – as we shall see – are very different from the rules for attacking the visible market. Notably there is no job advertisement to look at:

• nothing to tell you what the employer views as important

• nothing to give you clues on how to prioritize your key skills and achievements.

What you want a speculative mail shot to achieve

The hope with a speculative mail shot is that your application ends up on the right desk at the right time.

• Right desk means the desk of whoever is responsible for hiring people like you.

• Right time means when there is a need to recruit or a need to recruit is about to arise.

Failing this, what you want to achieve with your speculative mail shot is to ensure your cover letter and CV are put away in the right file. The right file in this case means the file the employer revisits when the need to recruit next comes up.

Revisiting previous applicants

Employers faced with a vacancy to fill often start by looking back at the details of interesting candidates they’ve kept on file. If they come across someone suitable then:

• The ‘someone suitable’ is asked in for an interview.

• If he/she ticks the boxes, he/she gets offered the job.

• No one else gets a look in.

What opportunities are you seeking to source?

A further point to consider here is that your speculative mail shot could connect with a vacancy which has already been advertised (one you’ve missed). In other words, the employer is already recruiting, so your application is added to the list. However, the idea behind a speculative mail shot is not to source jobs which are already out in the market place but to prise out two types of opportunity:

• first, where the employer is thinking about recruiting but hasn’t got round to it yet

• second, where your letter and CV generates sufficient interest to get an employer thinking ‘Can we create a slot for this person?’

We would add a third situation here which is typical of recruitment in recessionary times. Employers faced with a gap in their ranks hold fire and wait for signs of recovery to show before they commit themselves to hiring. An enquiry from someone who looks interesting can often tip the balance in these situations.

The task your cover letter has to perform

Employers are bombarded with unsolicited job applications and most of them are seen as time-wasters. Therefore – rather like applications for jobs which have been advertised – the first feat your cover letter has to perform is to make your application stand out from the rest. This is not easy when, as we said a little earlier, you start off with little idea of what qualities the employer sees as important. You are left fishing in the dark – or so it seems.

Tap into your professional network

Before sending in an unsolicited job application a question you need to ask yourself is ‘Why is this employer going to be interested in me?’

Apart from seeing what’s useful in the way of information out there on the Internet, a good place to start is with your professional ne...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• About the Author
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Sunday: Making a good first impression
• Monday: Making it work for you
• Tuesday: The structure of your letter
• Wednesday: Attacking the visible market
• Thursday: Attacking the invisible market
• Friday: Cover letters for consultants
• Saturday: Moving into the future
• 7 × 7
• Answers
• Copyright