Cover Letter Mistakes That Get Letters Binned

The unrecoverable ones

Three mistakes end the application on their own, regardless of what else is on the page. All three are mechanical rather than stylistic, which means they are entirely preventable.

1. The wrong company name. The classic copy-and-paste failure, and it arrives in inboxes constantly. It tells the reader exactly how the letter was produced. Search the finished document for every company name and every role title before you send it.
2. The wrong role title. Slightly less fatal and still damaging, particularly at employers running several similar vacancies. Applying for "the Marketing Executive position" at a company advertising a Marketing Manager suggests you did not read carefully.
3. Ignoring a written instruction. A requested file format, a reference number, a stated word limit, a specific subject line. Some employers use these deliberately as an attention test, and it is the easiest first cut available to them.

The letter that could go to anyone

The most common failure by a wide margin. It is not that the writing is bad; it is that nothing in it identifies the employer, so the reader learns only that the applicant is applying to things.

Restating the resume in prose

The second most common failure. The letter walks through the same jobs in the same order, in sentences instead of bullets, and adds nothing at all. It also doubles the reading time for zero new information, which readers notice.

The letter should contain what the resume structurally cannot: the reasoning behind a decision, the context that made something difficult, the connection to this employer. If you deleted your letter and the reader lost no information, the letter was not doing anything.

Adjective stacking

Every self-assigned adjective is a claim the reader cannot verify and would not act on. They are also uniformly distributed across the applicant pool, so they carry no discriminating information whatsoever.

The rule underneath all six: replace the adjective with the fact that would have caused someone else to use it.

Tone failures

• Apologising. "Although I lack direct experience", "I know I may not be the ideal candidate", "I hope you will consider". Each puts a weakness in the reader's mind before any evidence has arrived.
• Presuming. "I am confident I am the perfect fit", "I will call your office on Tuesday". Both make a decision that belongs to the employer.
• Over-familiarity. Jokes, exclamation marks, nicknames, "Hey there". A first approach to a stranger has a register, and it is not this one.
• Flattery. Praise for the company that is not attached to a specific fact reads as filler at best and as ingratiation at worst.
• Desperation. Mentioning how long you have been searching, or how much you need the role. Understandable, and it shifts the reader from assessment to sympathy, which is not a hiring emotion.
• Negativity about a current employer. The reader has no way to verify your account and will simply note that you are willing to say it to a stranger.

Presentation failures

• A letter longer than one page, or one squeezed onto a page in 9pt type with quarter-inch margins.
• A different font, header or colour from the resume it is attached to.
• A formal letterhead with a date and postal address pasted into a web form text box.
• File names like coverletter-final-v3.docx, which travel into the employer's folder and stay there.
• A wall of text with no paragraph breaks, which will be skimmed rather than read.
• Bullet points doing the work of an argument. In a 300-word letter, bullets usually mean the reasoning was not organised.
• Typos in the company name, the hiring manager's name, or the first sentence — the three places a reader is most alert.

Letters that read as generated

A newer failure and an increasingly costly one. Readers have become good at spotting text produced without a person behind it, and the tells are consistent: fluent, evenly weighted paragraphs that never say anything specific; a vocabulary of leveraging, aligning, seamlessly and dynamic; sentence rhythms that never vary; and an absence of any concrete number, name or event.

Drafting tools are useful for getting past a blank page. The problem is not the tool, it is submitting the draft. A generated letter cannot contain the two things that make a letter work — your actual evidence and your actual research — so it produces exactly the generic document described earlier, only more fluently. Add the specifics yourself, cut a third of the words, and read it aloud.

The five-minute check before you send

1. Search the document for every company name and every role title. Confirm each one is right.
2. Read the first two sentences and ask whether they could have gone to a different employer. If yes, rewrite them.
3. Delete every instance of "I believe", "I feel", "passionate", "dynamic" and "results-driven".
4. Check that at least one sentence contains a number, a name or a date.
5. Read the whole thing aloud. Anything you would not say out loud to a person comes out.
6. Confirm the file is a PDF, sensibly named, and actually attached.

For the resume half of the same problem, the free resume review flags the equivalent failures in the document going alongside, and the guide to quantifying achievements covers the discipline of replacing adjectives with facts in more depth than fits here.