Using Cover Letters and Customized Resumes
I'd like to briefly discuss the concept of "resume targeting."
This is the practice of customizing your resume for a specific
audience. Targeting with resumes is the same concept as
advertisers customizing their message to a particular
demographic. Recently, many big brand marketers have started
customizing their messages to make their commercials more
interesting so people using TiVo don't fast forward past them
and so they stand out from other commercials. For example,
Mercedes Benz recently started running commercials in New York
City where a couple drives first to La Guardia and then to JFK
Airport. For the average viewer who sees a few hours of
commercials a week, one that mentions two local places they're
familiar with will stand out in their mind. The same goes for
recruiters and employers who may receive hundreds of resumes a
week. If they get one that's customized for their interests, it
has a better chance of standing out.
It's a smart idea to have several versions of your resume
available for the different types of positions you're applying
for. For example, if you're applying for jobs in both the
insurance and financial services industries, you could have two
different resumes available with two slightly different
Objective statements. Further customizing your resume for the
specific position you're applying for makes sense if it's a
position you're really interested in and you want to stand out
from the pack. Keep in mind though that if you're sending out
100 resumes, it may not pay to spend 5-10 minutes customizing
each one since landing a job is also partly a numbers game.
Cover letters can be a powerful way to establish a relationship
with the potential employer - especially if you haven't met the
person yet. They also provide more room for you to discuss the
synergies between your goals and theirs than is afforded in a
resume. The goal of a cover letter is to establish a personal
relationship. To that end, a cover letter needs to at least
appear that it was customized for the specific person it's being
sent to. A good cover letter will reference the name of the
company it is being sent to and the position title. Even if
you're sending out a lot of cover letters, this can be
accomplished using the Mail Merge function in Microsoft Word.
When you're contacting an employer for the first time by e-mail,
the custom is to not include a cover letter but instead to
provide an introduction in the body of the e-mail itself. Your
resume can be attached in Word format. The introductory text you
include in the body of the e-mail has the same goal as a cover
letter: to establish a personal relationship. But it is less
formal than a cover letter.
Now for a brief word about what a cover letter should not be: it
is not a summary of your resume and should not look like a form
letter (even if it is one). Also, a cover letter should not
include information that's not in your resume. Some busy
managers and recruiters simply skip cover letters and don't read
them. However, sending a resume to an employer without a cover
letter will give them the impression you're randomly sending
your resume to lots of companies and don't really care in
particular about their firm. Unfortunately, you'll create the
same impression if you send a cover letter that looks like a
form letter and isn't customized at all. Even worse though, the
person reading the resumes may have spent an extra 20-30 seconds
reading a letter that did not provide them with any additional
information than was in your resume and did not take advantage
of the opportunity to start a personal relationship with the
person.
An exception to all of this is if you're posting your resume on
a job board. In this case, the recruiter bears some of the
responsibility in starting the relationship. Here's an analogy
to explain this: if you're looking for a date and you approach a
woman (or a man) at a bar with a canned pick-up line, they'll
probably respect you less than if you said something original.
On the other hand, if they were to approach you at that same
bar, they would be the ones who'd have to come up with a way to
introduce themselves.