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In my book, Proven Resumes Strategies That Have increased
Salaries, I
share the secrets I've learned to create powerful cover
letters. By following the examples in this section you will be able to create cover letters that grab an employer's attention and present you as a top candidate.
Cover letters are used to introduce yourself and explain to employers why you are contacting them.
Many employers won't accept a resume if it is not submitted with a cover letter. In today's job market, proper business etiquette requires that you include a cover letter with your resume. If you don't include one it implies that you are not familiar with the business world and can lead to your being rejected as a candidate. Now, let's look at what happens when employers screen cover letters.
Cover letters that FAIL and WHY
We'll use Christine's experience to illustrate what employers go through to screen cover letters. As an Assistant Director, Christine was asked to sort cover letters and select a few people to interview for a sales position. She was excited about the project and thought she'd have about 20 to 30 resumes to review. She was shocked when the Director gave her a box of 200 cover letters and resumes to sort that night. At first, she wanted to read each cover letter and resume. After a while Christine realized she had spent 30 minutes reading only 10 cover letters and resumes. She then decided to pick up her pace and spent about a minute scanning each cover letter and resume. After another 30 minutes she was dismayed at how few cover letters and resumes she had sorted. She realized she was going to be up all night if she didn't develop a faster method to sort the resumes.
So she asked herself what skills were most important for the job. Since it was a sales position she decided she would look for the word "sales" in the cover letters and would look for job titles that reflected sales experience in the resumes. She then began glancing at each letter. If nothing stood out, she didn't take the time to read the letter. Instead, she immediately turned to the resume, running her finger down it looking for sales experience. If either the letter or resume didn't describe sales experience she set them aside to be filed. At that point she spent about 10 to 30 seconds on each cover letter and resume.
Christine said she was amazed at how long and tedious this process was. Her eyes were tired at the end of two and a half hours. It had taken her that long to sort 200 resumes and select 30 applicants. She felt she had done a good job, but said, "I don't want to have to do that again!" What surprised me most about Christine's story is that she had owned a personnel agency and had been responsible for hiring hundreds of employees. Yet, even she felt overwhelmed when given such a large stack of resumes to sort.
This story shows how important it is to highlight and draw an employer's eye to important skills in your cover letter. All of the 200 applicants who had applied for the position knew it was for sales. But, only 30 of them had highlighted their sales background. That meant that over 90% of the applicants did not market their skills effectively in their cover letters or in their resumes.
This
information is extracted from my book, Proven
Resumes Strategies That Have Increased Salaries.
The cover letter strategies in my book have been responsible
for helping clients raise their pay $2,000 to $80,000 more
per year.
If you're having difficulty creating a resume and
cover letter - you
might consider hiring me to write your resume.
The fee is $150 or $250 ... or consider buying my largest
book, Proven
Resumes Strategies That Have Increased Salaries -
it's 331 pages for $9.95. |
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Order Master Resume
and Cover Letter Service
by Regina Pontow
Cover
letter landed 14 times as many interviews
from
$36,000 to $53,000
$17,000 pay Increase
sales
resume from $20,000 to $40,000+
from $5 hour offer to $46,000 with $6,000 pay increase
from
$80K to $160K in one job move
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Contents, Regina Pontow, 1997-2013
