Writing a Great Cover Letter For a Resume - Little Known Secrets

So you have just finished creating the perfect resume and now need an effective cover letter to go with it. Everyone knows that writing a great cover letter for a resume is extremely important. In fact, the entire purpose of the cover letter is to sell your qualifications enough to get you an interview, but there are a lot of little tricks that you can use to increase the chances of the employer actually calling you.

A cover letter is essentially a marketing ad designed to sell your qualifications to an employer. So where can we go to learn more about what works in a marketing advertisement? We actually get an endless stream of highly refined marketing ads sent right to our mailbox. Yes, we can actually learn something from the junk mail that we get every day. A lot of research goes into crafting the messages in junk mail, so why shouldn't we take advantage of some of this research and put it to some good use?

If you take some time and study your junk mail, you will see several things in common. Don't worry, others have studied it for you so you don't have to worry about doing this yourself. One thing you will notice about junk mail is that the vast majority have some sort of postscript (PS) at the end. This is because research has shown that people will more likely read the PS at the end of a letter than any other part of it. Clearly we can apply this technique to a cover letter.

Now that we know that a cover letter should have a postscript at the end, what should we put in it? Again, we can gain some insights on this by looking at marketing ads. Effective marketing ads always tell the reader what action they should take. Many cover letters are weak on the "call to action" statement. A cover letter should be specific on the action you want the reader to take. So for your cover letter, you can briefly reiterate your qualifications and politely request that the reader call you for an interview to further discuss employment opportunities. You can also state that you will follow-up in a few days with a phone call. This will demonstrate that you are motivated and on top of things.

There is one other really simple, yet effective thing we can learn from the marketing experts. Studies have shown that a signature signed with blue ink gets more responses from the reader than any other color. So instead of signing your expertly crafted cover letter with whatever pen you have lying around, you should look for your blue pen to maximize the effectiveness of your message.

You can find many more proven tips for writing an effective cover letter at Guerrilla Resumes.