Cover Notes: The Five Golden Rules

So, you’re submitting your CV to a recruiter or a new job. What do you put on the email? While this may sound like a minor consideration, it’s actually one of the most important things to consider when applying for a job. Your cover note is THE first impression, the packaging on the product. Now, there’s a million online guides to creating a good cover note that I’m not going to repeat here. These are worth a read and you should heed their advice. But there are some golden rules I’ll briefly put forward here:


Rule No 1. – Get your CV up to scratch
I can’t emphasise this enough. If your CV doesn’t convey your experience, a well crafted cover note is useless. Spend your time tweaking your CV first. Check out my previous posts on crafting a CV from scratch. The best cover notes are let down by a badly updated or structured CV.


Rule No 2. – Minimal for recruiters
Usually, when you send a CV to a recruiter, you’ll be applying via a website or a job board. The recruiter is unlikely to read your cover note and will instead go straight to opening the CV, making a cover note irrelevant. In fact, in this case, the cover note can be detrimental to your chances. Long cover notes will put the recruiter off. If you have to spend three paragraphs describing your suitability for the role, the chances are that your CV doesn’t do this enough – see Rule No. 1. It also begs the question – should you be applying for this role? However, sometimes a small intro is a nice opener – so keep it brief. Single paragraph, say 200 words (the length of this paragraph, in fact). Think about it as the opening paragraph on a press release. After all, that is what your CV is – the press release that sells the product – i.e. you. When applying to a potential employer - this is a different ball game entirely and depends on the process they have used – which could be an open application where you submit a cover note, or an application form that requires careful formatting. In these cases, check out the available online guides.


Rule No 3. – Do not bulk email
It’s tempting to send your CV on a group email to save time, but it immediately reduces your chances. It tends to look lazy and unplanned. What’s more, it’s obvious that you’ve not tailored your approach or application to each employer/ recruiter or job vacancy, which shows lack of attention to detail. It also suggests you’re signing up with a million recruiters and possibly seeking out the ensuing bun fight between them. Not cool. If you wouldn’t Cc or blind copy a group of journalists on a release, then don’t do the same with recruiters. A new job is worth taking a bit more time over. Address it to the recipient; ‘Dear Joe’ or ‘Hi Joe’, never just ‘Hi’, and most definitely not ‘Dear all, excuse the bulk email’.


Rule No 4. – Spell-check, spell-check, spell-check
Not just with auto spell checker and it’s American spelling. Read it once, read it three times. Get a friend to read it. This is PR – spelling errors will shoot you down. We don’t use a ‘z’ in ‘organised’ in the UK.


Rule No 5. – Make sense
On several occasions, I’ve had a CV with a cover note that says ‘I’m sure I would be a great addition to your company’. This is a common error when you ignore Rule No. 3. I’m not the employer, I’m the recruiter. Another common error is the use of overly complicated language – like someone has deliberately consulted a dictionary to find the most obscure or pretentious way of describing something in order to demonstrate a greater grasp of vocabulary. This is OK to a degree – PR is about the use of language – but make sure the word has the intended meaning and if it complicates the meaning, that’s a PR fail. You’re after a concise message.