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Successful Cover Letter Examples 

I like to look at new ways of attracting attention when applying for jobs. Getting an interview is largely dependent on standing out against the HUGE stack of applications sitting in front of the hiring manager.

Writing a "successful cover letter" is not rocket science, it's simply a matter of taking the time necessary to think about what your next employer wants to hear and doing it in a personalized, sincere fashion that will get you noticed. 

For fun, I apply for lots of crazy jobs, some way outside my realm, but you never know what exciting opportunities you might find. A lot of times employers don't really do a great job writing job postings, and I've found jobs that really seemed to suck, posted over and over until I snap...I just have to dig further to see what it's about and apply for it. I've been pleasantly surprised by landing some of my best jobs that way just by being annoyed at the employer's posting -quite by accident.

On average, I get an interview about 50% of the time if I take the time to craft what would become a successful cover letter and tweak the resume.

This stat does not hold true when it comes to HR recuiters simply because most of the posting are fake just to build up their contact database and a lot of the time the employer, whoever they are, wind up hiring directly. That's been my experience anyway.

My chances fair quite a bit higher when my resume finds it's way in front of an real live knowledgeable person who knows their business and the role they are trying to fill -in other words, the direct manager or the boss man.

Writing successful cover letters can take me anywhere from several hours to several days -depending on how badly I want to make an impression and how badly I want to prove to myself that I can get the interview. I estimate that I take about 5 hours to fully research the company, sprinkle in some of their jargon, write a great cover letter and hone the resume.

You only get one chance, about 30 seconds, to grab the readers attention.

After reading, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, by Youngme Moon, I've got lots of sneaky ways that I want to try in future applications. Writing a resume is, after all, the ultimate marketing challenge where like it or not, we're all salesmen.