Why I Didn’t Even Read your Résumé

How to get your job application noticed

Q: I just finished university and now want to apply for design jobs. Any tips on résumé stuff?

A: Applying for jobs sucks. What you may not realize is that hiring sucks, too.

Sorting through job applications is a soul-killing prospect. Sturgeon’s Law is too optimistic to describe the experience. Easily 99% of job applications are tedious, overstuffed, boring messes.

It’s like panning goat shit for gold. There’s the promise of reward, and a little bit of novelty — hey, look, goat shit! — but pretty soon the proportion of gold to shit gets tiresome. It doesn’t take long to start worrying more about getting to the end of the pile than really inspecting it closely. Any application that doesn’t immediately glimmer, well… it just looks like more goat shit to me.

This is the sad, dehumanizing reality of job hunting. Applicants don’t get a ton of attention each, and even brilliant people get overlooked when they undersell themselves.

That’s why a strong cover letter is the most important part of your application. I only look at the portfolio if the cover letter tells me it’s worth my time. And you may not want to hear this, but the first time I look at your résumé will be fifteen minutes before your interview.

Everything rides on the quality of your cover letter.

Luckily for you, the aforementioned pile of goat shit drags down the curve significantly. Writing a cover letter that gets you noticed only takes a few considerations.

Don’t call me “Hiring Manager”

When you address your cover letter to “Hiring Manager” or “HR Department”, it tells me that you’re using the same cover letter verbatim in multiple applications. This is called “shotgun job-hunting”, and it’s annoying as hell. It tells me that you don’t particularly care where you work, and you don’t have any consideration for the person who has to read your shitty application.

You might be surprised how easy it is to find out who’s in charge of hiring for a position. Ask somebody at the company over email, or Twitter, even. If that doesn’t pan out, address your letter to the company or the specific department you’re applying to. I happily field plenty of email that starts with “Dear Mule”; I’ll answer to a lot of names, just so long as I can tell that you meant to write to us.

Speak to the job description

Not all job descriptions are as good as Mule’s, but they’re always a valuable resource when you’re applying for a job. The description is peek at the rubric by which applicants are judged. When I read your cover letter, I’m comparing you to the notional person we had in mind when we wrote the description.

We’ve laid out what the right person for the job looks like; now tell me why you’re that person. You have one key advantage over the fictional person dreamt up in the job description — you’re real. Prove it with concrete examples.

Show me that you’re a human

Something about a business environment really screws with some peoples’ writing. All their contractions fall out, they pad their sentences with buzzwords, and they start saying the word “utilize”. Protip: it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Another common mistake I see is turning the cover letter into a list of qualifications. That’s what your (as-yet unread) résumé is for. What I’d rather see is a brief description of what you do and why you’re special. Remember that this is only the first step of a process. You can show off your credentials later down the line.

There are ways to sound confident and competent without also sounding like a robot. Aim for a tone that conveys formality without being stilted. When in doubt, consult with the best book on writing ever written.

Nobody hires for fun. They hire because they need someone bad enough that they’re willing to shovel through goat shit to find them. Believe me: I want you to succeed.

Finding a good cover letter is a moment of joy for me. It portends an end to suffering, sure. But it’s also — I hope — the first tiny kernel of a long and productive working relationship.

Keep that in mind when you apply for jobs. You are signaling your wish to spend countless hours of your life on a company, with the people at that company. You are writing a letter to your future beloved coworkers. They want to find you as much as you want to find them. Don’t make them look too hard. 💩

Liam Campbell is a web developer and designer. He works for Mule Design Studio, where he writes code and defaces whiteboards. His Twitter feed is mostly nonsense, but sometimes pretty good.

Thanks to Stephen Fox for the suggestion.