The Cover Letter Toolbox
Or, how to write cover letters while autistic.
One of the autistic traits I have is difficulties with what's called "expressive language" - I don't think in words, and putting my thoughts into words takes a lot of time and effort. For me, going straight from a blank page to a full sentence that makes sense is difficult, and making that sentence sound professional is even harder. So I came up with a way to avoid starting from a blank page. This is what I do instead.
When I've read a job posting and decided I want to apply, I start by making a list of qualifications and things from the job posting that I have or can do, just a list of words or short phrases like
Customer service experience Scheduling Microsoft Office
Then I go under each of those list items and make it into a full sentence.
Customer service experience: I have five years of experience in customer service.
Once I have the most basic version of that sentence, I think about details that I can add to it. The point of a cover letter is two things-
to summarize the things from your resume that are relevant to this job, so the person doing the hiring doesn't have to read the whole thing and connect the dots themselves.
to add details and explain things that might not be in your resume.
So some details that I want to add here are that I didn't just talk to customers myself for five years, for part of that time I was a manager responsible for training other people to give good customer service. And I was good at that- we always got good results on our customer surveys, and we also always hit our goals for stuff like signing people up for the loyalty program. So now I've got a second sentence:
As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.
Another thing from the job posting that I want to address with this bit is that the job I'm applying for involves helping people over the phone a lot. So I want them to know that even though my experience is in a different environment (retail instead of an office front desk) I did still have to answer phone calls and help people over the phone. This is the type of detail that's not in my resume and that someone wouldn't necessarily guess, but I really did answer a lot of phone calls working in retail.
I also added a little bit of Flavor, so it's not just assisting customers, it's "welcoming, respectful assistance". Yes, I did try like five different words there before picking these ones. Usually I look back to the job posting and pick something that relates to what they've said they want. But I find it a lot easier to figure out details like this after I have the basic structure.
This is what I ended up with for my Bit About Customer Service:
I have five years of experience in customer service, providing welcoming, respectful assistance to customers over the phone and in person. As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.
If I really wanted to add a lot of detail, I'd put numbers in here- how big "our entire team" was, what the "best results" were and how we were measuring it. But the position I'm applying for is with a small organization, and probably doesn't involve measuring sales in the same way, so I decided not to add that. If I was applying for another retail job, I'd include those things.
I repeat this same process with each of the qualifications from my list, copy-paste each of those bits in order of how important they are, and then I need an opening and a closing. For the opening, I start by stating the obvious.
Dear hiring manager, I am applying for/interested in/etc. [this position]
and then I apply my school-essay-writing techniques and do a one-sentence preview of the qualifications I just got done writing about.
I am confident I have the customer service skills, computer expertise and organized mindset to excel in this position.
For the closing, this job posting specifically mentioned putting your contact information in your cover letter, so I did that, and then I like to thank them for looking at my application because that's a nice polite note to end on.
I can be reached at [contact info]. Thank you for taking the time to consider my application, and I look forward to hearing from you. [signature]
Extra Bonus Brownie Points:
Go to their company website and add something that shows you have looked at their company website. Like yes, the main reason you're applying for this job is it's available and you need money, but besides that, there's gotta be something at least a little interesting about this company that might be cool if you get to work for them. In this case they had a whole big section about charities they donate to and how they get involved in their local community, so I added this right before my closing:
[this company's] contributions to charities such as [things from their website] are truly admirable. I've grown to love [this city] since moving here, and I would be honored to be part of an organization that does so much to contribute to the community.
Now wait before you go here's the important part:
I don't delete any of this stuff.
I copy/paste out the finished bits into a new document to send to the recruiter, but I keep that list of qualifications with sentences under each one.
Now I have a document with a list of qualifications I have and nice professional-sounding descriptions of those qualifications, and for the next cover letter I write, I can reuse them if they're relevant, so I don't have to redo all this work of making words make sense. If I decide to change them a little bit for the next job, I'll keep the new version next to the old one under the same heading. I also keep my openings and closings.
I used to have a big file like this but I apparently didn't back it up before my old computer died, so I'm having to re-create it, but you guys this saves me so much time I would otherwise spend staring at a blinking cursor. And it's easier than saving the full finished cover letter and trying to pull sentences out of it, because all the Bits are already organized by topic. (And it lowers the risk of accidentally copy-pasting the wrong company's name.)
I <3 my cover letter workbox.
