Top 3 Fundamentals of Avoiding Colossal Cover Letter Errors
Stop, think, and review that cover letter.
The tsunami raged toward me, and I stood resolute on the seawall with the winds whipping around me, and the waves towered above me…
And then my Gmail inbox exploded with job applicants.
Google alerts were popping off with a frequency and intensity only rivaled by an errant R2D2 unit gone defective.
In a small game development studio or startup, there usually isn’t a person who is an HR professional who is looking at resumes they receive — it’s usually the producer. In the case of one of my past studios, the unlucky individual was me. We didn’t have an applicant tracking system (ATS) that could filter unwanted applicants. I guess I should have paid for that service, but we needed to save money.
As a part of my job responsibilities, I reviewed prospective job-seekers for three years — and in this timeframe, I calculated that I had reviewed almost 1,000 resumes and cover letters. We hired only 65 in our studio at the time — so if you figure how many we accepted into the studio, it was less than 1%. So I think we did a pretty good job of reviewing candidates — but I the lone rock in the seawall that the endless flood of applicants broke upon.
Some days I wanted an eyewash station next to my desk to give my eyes some relief after reviewing some strangely written resumes and poorly composed cover letters. After this experience, I had immense respect for the men and women who are in the HR field who do this daily and also for the software that would distill down the resumes to the ones that were viable candidates.
What I remember almost three years later were the crazy mistakes that people would make in their cover letters. As a result of my trial by fire, I decided to relate the top three fundamental errors I saw during those scarring times.
Always Check the Company Name
It’s a simple thing, right? But this was the number one thing I remember vividly encountering while reading an applicant’s letter. The candidate’s resume could be stellar, so I would start to read the cover letter. The letter could be nicely formatted, and the opening paragraph could have a witty anecdote — for a game we did not create. Wait, what? Whoa! Abrupt stop. I read a little further and find out the person wasn’t talking about my company at all — they are applying for a job at an entirely different company — unintentionally.
So what happened to all that attention to detail the candidate was referencing in the rest of their letter? That trust has evaporated — and for me, they immediately go to the back of the line unless their resume has something that can overcome this error. Usually, the company switcheroo happens when the candidate is applying to multiple companies simultaneously and gets mixed up in the process. The wrong cover letter gets sent, they didn’t save the file after they switched companies or a cut and paste error. It happens to all of us… yeah, even the author of this article!
Multitasking is difficult for the brain to do, but each submission should be handled with care during the job search process.
For anyone, researching the company they are applying for is a mandatory task. But that is only one part of the puzzle — the pieces need to be assembled correctly, so the whole package comes together.
Never Write a Cover Letter on a Phone
Just don’t do it. Everyone is in a hurry these days, and our phones are an extension of our person but do not send in a resume with a cover letter sent from a phone. When I used to get these cover letters, I could tell by the brevity and the lack of formatting that the application came from the phone. It was shocking to me that someone would send a hastily written cover letter/resume to a job they supposedly wanted while waiting for a latte or casually walking down the street and tapping away on their phone.
I may be old school, but creating my cover letter on a laptop or a desktop to make sure I can send a proper document is a priority. The cover letter acts as your introduction to a person at a company and shows that the applicant is serious. Applying for a job isn’t like Tinder or Snapchat — it’s not a casual commitment. However, there is a rise in apps that work like Tinder for job searchers.
And if the candidate were to use acronyms like “TTYL” and drop emojis in a cover letter, I can almost guarantee that the applicant isn’t getting a high-paying job with most companies when they break out the shorthand. As a skeptic, you may say, “Well, these are just kids sending those types of job submissions to you.” Unbelievably enough — I had seasoned professionals sending applications in with those problems — it was just more prevalent at a younger demographic. Still, I was shocked at how many brief cover letters with those errors I did receive from people that had been in the industry as long as I had been.
I’m Begging You, Applicants — Please Check Spelling and Grammar
Nothing is easier than hitting a button, and the computer spits out a bunch of spelling and grammatical errors. A person can review them all before sending their cover letter off to the prospective employer — easy peasy — right? Maybe the button should blink a flashing warning when it thinks a candidate will send a cover letter without using the tools that are so simple to use.
I never really checked grammatical errors since I never had that level of command of the English language — but using an off-the-shelf solution like Grammarly (which I used in this article) can help you avoid embarrassing errors that may make someone cringe.
Not spell-checking a document is like driving without a seatbelt, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, or parachuting without checking equipment before getting on the plane. Spell checking a cover letter should be second nature and done at regular intervals and right before one sends all of their documentation out. If a reader hits a spelling error in a cover letter — in the words of the late Bill Paxton, “Game over, man!”
Just Take a Deep Breath and Review your Cover Letter Before you Hit “Send.”
Hopefully, these observations will help anyone avoid these heinous cover letter errors and give some other exasperated producer or HR person a well-deserved break. Since this article gives me flashbacks of those resume hijinks, I think I’ll wait a bit before publishing an article about the crazy things I saw in those 1,000 resumes.
