A lot of career advice says cover letters don't matter anymore. Some companies even say on their listings "cover letter optional." And in one sense, it's true that a bad cover letter won't usually sink an otherwise strong application.
But a genuinely good cover letter can move you from the "maybe" pile to the "yes" pile — especially for roles where multiple candidates have similar qualifications. It's the place where you can make a human case for yourself that a resume, by its structured format, can't.
The problem is that most cover letters are bad. Not maliciously bad — just templated, formulaic, and completely indistinguishable from the hundreds of others the recruiter has read this week. Here's how to write one that isn't.
The first good cover letter I wrote was not especially elegant. It was short, specific, and a little awkward in places, but it sounded like a person had actually read the posting and cared about the role. That is the standard I think people should aim for. A cover letter does not need to sound polished in a corporate way. It needs to sound real.
A cover letter is not a summary of your resume. If you're just restating what's on the resume in paragraph form, you're wasting the reader's time and missing the point.
A cover letter is for three things:
The first point is the most underutilized. If you're changing careers, the resume looks like a mismatch. A cover letter can explain the through-line. If you have a gap in employment, the cover letter is where you can address it directly and confidently. If you're applying to a company because you've been a user of their product and have genuine opinions about it, that context has to come from you, not from your job history.
Don't open with "I am writing to express my interest in the [role] position at [company]." That sentence is automatic disqualification from the "actually read carefully" pile. The reader has seen it ten thousand times.
Open with something specific. Why this company? Why this role? What's the real reason you're applying and not just hitting "easy apply" everywhere?
The second version is specific, shows genuine familiarity with the product, and makes a small but real observation. It reads like it was written for this company, not copied from a template.
When I write a cover letter now, I usually ask myself one blunt question before I start: what do I know about this company that I could not say about ten other companies? If the answer is nothing, the letter probably does not deserve to exist. That filter has saved me from writing a lot of generic filler.
Pick one or two things from your experience that are most relevant to this specific role and go into real detail on them. Not a summary — a real description of what you did, how you did it, and what happened as a result.
The key word is "specific." Numbers, outcomes, real decisions you made. "I improved system performance" is forgettable. "I reduced our API response time from 800ms to 180ms by identifying and fixing N+1 query patterns in our ORM layer" is not.
One paragraph connecting your experience to what they're trying to build. Not "I would be a great asset to your team" — that's noise. Something like: "You're building X, which requires Y. I've spent three years doing Y, specifically in the context of Z. I'd bring that to your team."
Then a clean sign-off. No excessive flattery, no list of everything you can offer, just a clear indication of what you'd like next and a thank you.
Cover letters should be short. Aim for three to four paragraphs, somewhere between 250 and 400 words. Longer than that and most recruiters won't finish reading.
The discipline of keeping it short forces you to choose your strongest material. If you're struggling to cut it down, that's usually a sign that the middle section needs to be tighter — one strong specific example is better than three mediocre ones.
Yes, you should customize your cover letter for each application. No, that doesn't mean rewriting it from scratch every time. What it means is: at minimum, the specific hook at the top and the closing paragraph should be tailored to the company and role. The middle paragraphs can stay mostly the same if the roles are similar — that's your core material.
A useful test: if you could swap the company name in your cover letter with a different company and it would read exactly the same, you haven't customized it enough.
If the application says optional and you have nothing genuinely specific and interesting to say about why this role and this company, don't write one. A generic cover letter is worse than no cover letter — it just creates more noise for the reader to process before getting to your resume.
But if you have something real to say — a genuine connection to the product, relevant experience you want to explain, or context that makes your application make more sense — write the cover letter. It can be the thing that tips a close decision in your favor.
The best letters usually include one small detail that proves you paid attention. Maybe you noticed the company ships a certain kind of feature, maybe you used the product in a real workflow, or maybe you solved a problem in your last role that is almost identical to the one they are hiring for. One real detail is more convincing than a paragraph of praise.
SWARA Editorial Team writes practical, experience-based job search guides for developers.