An INCREDIBLE cover letter "Secret" That has PROVEN to have excellent results for my clients.

I work in a job center, mainly with clients who have been looking for a job for a long time but have not been successful. Because it is a large job center, we often have multiple clients applying for the same jobs. After working there for a few months, I started to notice something that I found really strange and disconcerting.

The best candidates very often weren’t even called in for an interview, let alone getting the job!

When I say “best” I mean some of the best candidates for the job: best resume, best experience, best references, best performance in school, additional training, good match for the job, etc.

These top candidates were often overlooked entirely!

To make this even more perplexing, I noticed that many times candidates who were MUCH less qualified, including very obvious examples, were called in for an interview and hired to the exclusion of the best candidates.

I started asking my colleagues: “What the hell is going on here!?” but they couldn’t solve it either.

The first few times this happened, I thought maybe it was a fluke or that the people who got the job knew someone at the company. However, after it happened over and over and over again, I slowly began to realize that something else had to be going on.

I couldn’t understand it at first. He didn’t make sense and the more he studied it the less sense he made. He would review application materials and reinterview clients.

I really care about my clients and I wanted to help them, but they walked all over me.

Then one day while reviewing a couple of recent cases, I had one of those “Ah-HA!!!” times. It all had to do with the cover letter!

Applicants who had inadvertently submitted a UNIQUE cover letter were the ones called for interviews. They weren’t necessarily the best candidates, but they had a unique cover letter.

Now, notice that I didn’t say “best cover letter” or “professional cover letter.” I said “unique cover letter!”

After doing some more research and doing some follow-up interviews with some of the hiring managers, I determined that they were getting so many requests that they just didn’t have the time to go through each request in detail. Instead, what they did was skim through all the cover letters and make their preliminary decisions based solely on this.

Now this is where the best candidates often get into trouble. They did what most people do and that is take a professional cover letter template and modify it for their purposes. This way, they get a professional-sounding letter to include, but guess what? It sounded like someone else’s professional sound card. In other words, it doesn’t stand out! It was easily overlooked by the hiring manager in his rush to read all the letters in that giant pile of applications that have to go through.

What this means is that hiring managers didn’t even read the resumes of the most highly qualified candidates because their cover letters were so “vanilla” that they didn’t attract the attention of the hiring manager and were promptly rejected. lot.

Do I think this is fair? NO!!

However, it is today’s reality with our very tight job market when hiring managers are absolutely inundated with mountains of applications.

Once I started working with my top candidates to change their cover letters to something truly unique, they started getting interviews and getting hired. Now, life makes sense again.