The cover letter nobody skims

Most cover letters are read for about four seconds and then set down. Not because the reader is lazy, but because the first sentence told them everything: this is a template, the same letter went to eleven other firms, and the only thing that changed was the name in the address.

That is a fixable problem, and it is fixable in one paragraph.

What the letter is actually for

Your CV answers what have you done. The letter answers a question the CV cannot: why this, and why you.

Those are the only two things it is for. A letter that spends three paragraphs restating your CV has wasted the one document where you get to sound like a person with a reason.

The four paragraphs

One: the specific reason. Not "I have always been passionate about finance." Name something real about this employer that you could not have written about anyone else — a business line, a recent result, a market they moved into, a thing they do differently from their competitors. One or two sentences, and it must be true and checkable.

"Your interim results put non-funded income at just under a third of total revenue, which is a different balance from most of your peer group, and it is the part of a bank's business I find most interesting to understand."

If you cannot write that sentence, you have not read anything about them, and the letter is going to show it. Twenty minutes on the annual report or the investor relations page fixes this permanently.

Two: why this role, from your side. What you want from it and why you are ready for it now. This is where a specific thing you have done earns its place — not repeated from the CV, but explained. The CV says you built something. The letter says what you learned from building it and why it points here.

Three: what you bring. One claim, with evidence. Not a list of adjectives. "Analytical, hardworking and a team player" describes everybody who has ever applied for anything and therefore describes nobody.

Four: the close. Short. What you are asking for, where they can reach you, thank you. Four lines at most, and no grovelling — "I would be grateful for the mere opportunity to be considered" puts you below the reader before you have met, and interviews go better between equals.

Rules that do real work

One page, four paragraphs, and white space. A wall of text does not read as thorough. It reads as someone who could not decide what mattered.

No sentence that could appear in someone else's letter. Read each line and ask whether a classmate applying to a different firm could use it unchanged. If yes, it is filler. This single test removes about half of most letters and improves all of them.

Address a person if you can find one. "Dear Hiring Manager" is fine. "To Whom It May Concern" is a phrase from a different century and it reads as a mass mailing, which it usually is.

Write it in your own voice, then remove the flourishes. A letter that sounds like a legal document written by someone nervous is worse than one that sounds like a capable person explaining themselves clearly. You are being assessed, among other things, on whether a client could stand to read your emails.

Proofread it twice, then have someone else read it once. In a stack of competent applications, a typo in the first line is a cheap reason to stop reading, and readers are looking for cheap reasons to stop reading.

When not to send one

If the application portal does not have a field for it, do not force it into the CV upload as a second page. If the posting explicitly says CV only, send a CV only — following instructions is part of what is being assessed, and it is a strange hill to lose on.

And if you are applying through somebody who knows you, the letter matters less than the introduction. Spend the effort on giving that person something easy to forward: two sentences about what you are looking for that they can paste into their own email without editing.

The follow-through

Cover letters get you read. The next thing is a conversation where someone asks you to explain, out loud, something you wrote down — and the gap between writing well and speaking well is wider than most people expect.