Cover Letter Examples – Get a Better Job by Writing a Better Cover Letter

Did you know that by national average, your typical American could easily take 9 months to find a new job? I don’t know about you, but most of us just can’t afford to wait that long. What if there was a way to “magically” cut that jobhunting time down into ribbons?

Well, there is…and it’s called a cover letter. Well, I guess that’s not entirely accurate…it’s called a good cover letter. Most job applications require a resume, and why would you ever turn in an application without a resume? Well, the same goes for a cover letter…why would you ever turn in a resume without a cover letter?

When a corporate paperpusher is trying to sift through hundreds of job applications in the pursuit of finding ONE person to fill the slot, do you really think he or she is going to sit there and read through every single resume, check every single source, and give every single applicant the same chance? No! Nobody in the world has time to do that. What that person is going to do is look at all the cover letters. It’s the first thing they’ll read, and it’s your first elimination to get through.

The process is simple: the resumes with good cover letters stay, and the ones with the poor cover letters –or worse, NONE at all!– will be kept “on file.” Translation: paper shredder.

So if you want to survive the first initial culling, you’ll want to not only have a cover letter, you’ll want to have the best one you possibly can! Your resume is important too, and of course you have to be a decent candidate for the job, but the right cover letter can not only open the door but also lay down a welcome mat.

But all of this is well and good if you know how to write a killer cover letter…but what if you didn’t go to college for four years to get a degree in Cover Letter Writing? What if you’re just that guy out there who’s looking for a job? Well, ask yourself…what’s the best way to learn how to do something?

You have somebody teach you! You find somebody who’s written a great cover letter in his life, and see what he did. You learn by example. And why just one person? Learn from dozens of examples…see what works, and learn how to adapt it to your own personal needs. By no means am I telling you to plagiarize or rip off of other people, but by seeing what others have done you can see how you can do it as well.

But where do you find these cover letter examples? How do you figure out which ones work and which ones don’t? Well, I can help you out a little bit there. http://coverletters.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/cover-letter-examples/ has links to a bunch of places where you can build your cover-letter-writing skills by checking out what others have done and learning about it. Think about it…nine months. That’s how long it could take you to find a job…unless you open up the door with an awesome cover letter.