Your Cover Letter is Better With Bullet Points
Episode 449 | Author: Emilie Aries
Use the rule of three for a compelling, concise cover letter that highlights your top skills right away.
If I surveyed a thousand job seekers about their least favorite parts of the job search, I bet most of them would put “writing a cover letter” near the top of their list. Let’s be honest: cover letters can really slow your job search roll! You’re trying to find the right words to balance between over- and underselling yourself, all while questioning whether anyone is even going to read it. And I can tell you from experience that reading cover letters can be a tedious task, too.
Nevertheless, a cover letter is still an important way to show you’re invested and interested in the opportunity. Done right, this letter puts your best foot forward to highlight the most important details of your application before the employer gets to your rockstar resume.
Read on to discover my go-to strategy that will help you turn any rambling, jargon-filled puff piece into a concise, readable, relevant cover letter.
Embrace the power of bullet points
The sight of huge walls of margin-to-margin text gets people down. Keep your potential future boss interested—break this mold with my favorite de-densifier: the bullet point!
By couching your main takeaways within bulleted sections that are easy to absorb at a glance, you set your cover letter up to be one of the few that’s actually read.
The tried-and-true Rule of Three strategy
The magic number for bullet points (and LinkedIn taglines, and interview answers) is three.
Showcase your discernment by detailing three—and only three—key points in your cover letter. You want the reader to remain interested long enough to flip to your resume, and running through a laundry list of skill after skill is a surefire way to bore them quickly.
How to structure your cover letter
Once you have carefully selected the characteristics or skills most relevant to the job you’re applying for, follow these simple steps:
Write an introduction paragraph that briefly outlines why you’re applying for the role. Don’t waste time sharing how you found out about the job unless you have an impressive name to drop (a key stakeholder, say). Instead, explain in three or fewer sentences (there’s that magic number again) why you’re throwing your hat in the ring.
Close your intro with a stand-alone sentence like this: “In my attached resume, you’ll see the following skills and experiences that I believe will make me an asset to your team:”Now, dive into your bullet points. Remember, these are the most relevant reasons you’re the best choice for this role, the skillsets or experiences that are most foundational to the job.
Rather than launching right into a dense explanation, make each skill stand out by starting each bullet point with that phrase or word in bold text before devoting a couple of sentences to a high-level explanation of what you bring to the table in this regard. For example:Confident communication: In my prior roles as Community Organizer and Team Facilitator, I often found myself speaking publicly and managing multiple stakeholder groups, which requires both sound judgment and at times, delicate diplomacy, which would serve me well in this capacity as Communications Lead.
Repeat this process for your next two bullet points.
Finally, close your letter concisely. Reiterate that you’re excited for the opportunity to speak further about the role, allude to your attached resume, which details your qualifications in full, say thank you, and sign off.
Using a cover letter formula like this not only gives you a solid jumping-off point for one of the more stressful parts of job searching, but after you’ve written a few for different positions, you’ll have a collection of bullet points you can mix and match for any future applications, accelerating your writing time.
If you try this method, I’d love to hear how it works for you. Share your experience, or your own tried-and-true cover letter tips and tricks in our Courage Community on Facebook or in our group on LinkedIn.
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
Hired: my Job Search Accelerator
Episode 365, How To Write A Meaningful Cover Letter For Today’s Competitive Job Market
Episode 415, How To Use AI To Write Cover Letters Faster
SIMPLIFY YOUR NEXT JOB SEARCH:
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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 449. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up, and today's episode is a quick one. For my job seekers out there, I want to acknowledge that cover letters are the bane of almost every job seeker's existence. They're hard to write, they can feel overwhelming, they can feel cumbersome, and it often leaves you wondering if anyone's actually reading your cover letters, if they're worth the trouble. On the flip side, I would also argue that reading cover letters can be a bore. These can be long, overly wordy, nonsensical, jargon filled puff pieces that can be really boring to read. So, here's my go to strategy that will both make cover letter writing easier, and it'll actually make your cover letter easier for them to read. Making them feel less intimidated by looking at a huge block of text and make the employer more likely to actually read your cover letter, which, while a pain in the butt to write, is a really powerful opportunity to frame your entire application before they get to the resume.
The best way to write cover letters is to leverage the power of bullet points. Let me explain what I mean. I'm a big believer in the rule of three. Whether you're preparing for an interview or writing a cover letter, or just coming up with a catchy tagline for your LinkedIn tagline right below your name, I think you really only have three arguments to make, three points to fit into any one of those places as to why you're a good fit for this role. So, for example, in my LinkedIn tagline, I have leadership development, learning and development, and community organizer. Those are the three foundational things you need to know about me to know if we'd be a good fit working together.
Similarly, you've got three arguments to make in your cover letter, in your interview as to why you're a good fit for the role. Anything more than three starts to feel too long or people start to lose track of. So if you want folks to follow an argument, stay focused on no more than making three concise points. So I leverage the rule of three in a lot of different places. But here's what it looks like when you leverage the rule of three to make your cover letter easier to write and easier to read.
First, you open with an intro paragraph that frames why you're applying for the role. Spare them the details regarding how you heard about the role unless you have a VIP name to drop, like I know your president and they invited me to apply for this role. If that's the case, then by all means drop it. Otherwise, get to the point quickly. In one paragraph, I'm talking three sentences or less ideally as to why you are making a transition at this point in your career, why you've decided to throw your hat in the ring, and then I recommend my job seekers use a little line like this, in my attached resume you'll see the following skills and experiences that I believe would make me an asset to your team: bullet point one, there's your first main point. Bullet point two, there's your second main point. And bullet point three, there's your third main point. And I'll get more into how to write those bullet points in just a moment.
But you want to frame the top to say, here are the three biggest reasons why I am a no brainer for this role. It's a focused cover letter, it gets straight to the point, and it's less intimidating for readers because they don't see a huge page full of line to line text, margin to margin, they see a nice use of bullet points that creates a little bit of white space that makes it look easier and more concise to read. So, leave off that first top section before your bullet points with a nice little sentence that ends in a colon.
Now, after you end that intro paragraph, when you go into the bullet points, I recommend this specific formatting that makes your bullet points easier to read. These are going to be chunky bullet points, right? Dense bullet points, but there's only going to be three of them. I'm not saying, like, you should have a laundry list of ten one line bullet points. No, I just want to use bullet points to make your paragraphs a little easier and tighter to read. So the first bullet point is going to have a word, a phrase, a noun, something that says, I am a confident communicator. Let's say you're going to lean into the communication skills that you're bringing to the table, and that part of it should be in bold, like you might write confident communication over the past decade. As a speaker, podcaster and author, I'm comfortable addressing crowds of all different sizes and would be confident that my ability to communicate effectively would be an asset in this position on your team.
So you're going to give that bolded first inclination of the skill set. You're speaking to a little colon, and then one to two more sentences in that bullet point that explain the experiences you're bringing to the table at a very high level. Remember, you're really just framing your resume. You can save all the metrics and details in your resume. Let those do a more detailed job of telling your story. This is just setting the stage, setting the table, so to speak. And then you move on to bullet point number two, which might be something like, experience in cross functional roles colon, at both x-corporation and my prior role at, Acme corporation, I operated in highly matrixed environments that leveraged my cross functional leadership skills. So again, you're giving a very high level, but key picture of a key skill that you know is foundational to the role that you're applying to. And you're not going into the details here about what you did and when you did it. That's what your resume does. But you're giving a nice little bullet point that says, here's number two. The second reason why I am a no brainer shoo in for this role and then repeat for step three. You've got three bullet points there that have the skill set or experience that you know is foundational to this role. And a little sentence or two, explaining how your resume will go into more detail on your experience and credibility confidently sets you up to be capable in this capacity and this is why you're a good fit. Now, this requires discernment, right? This requires boiling it down to three, but let your resume have many more skills and experiences than your cover letter does. But your cover letter should speak to some of the foundational, central, essential to the role skills and experiences that you know you bring to the table.
Now, once you've illustrated those skills and experiences in those three bullet points in your cover letter, you sign off. You make it short, you make it sweet. Say that you're excited at the opportunity and you'd hope to get the chance to talk further. Mention that you've attached your resume or in my included resume in my application. You'll see lots more details, experiences about these skills and more. Thank you for the consideration. Sign off that creates a template for your cover letters that is easy to replicate. All you do is zhuzh which bullet points you're using per application. Maybe verbal communication, cross functional leadership and writing skills are really relevant for job A, but for job B, you might lean into the verbal and written communication, but ditch the cross functional leadership if that's not relevant to the role and add something else like, your editorial skills.
Whatever it may be, you're going to end up having multiple iterations of your cover letter with kind of easy to pick and mix style bullet points that can stand on their own or be picked and mixed as needed for different jobs, but always try to limit yourself to that rule of three. What I find is that letters formatted this way are a lot easier to write and therefore easier for you to get more applications out the door. We know the modern job search requires a bit of a numbers game to it. It's a high volume job search process these days, so it helps you get out the door, get that application in and show that you're really interested and invested in the role by always including a cover letter. But a cover letter that's just easier to write and bonus points, it's also easier to read.
If you want lots more strategies and tips for navigating the modern job search, make sure to check out HIRED my on demand job search accelerator. You can learn more at bossedup.org/gethired and if you put this cover letter strategy to use for you, I want to hear about it.
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Let's keep the conversation going, as always in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook, or in our Bossed Up LinkedIn group. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose and together let's lift as we climb.
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