Ask ten recruiters whether cover letters matter and you'll get ten different answers, which is itself the answer: it depends, and the dependency is predictable.

When a cover letter changes the outcome

It matters when:

The application requires one. Not writing it is a filter you've applied to yourself.
You're switching fields. The resume shows an unexplained jump. The letter is the only place to explain it.
There's a gap or an oddity — a career break, a short stint, a relocation. Better addressed in one confident sentence than left for someone to speculate about.
The company is small. At a 30-person company the hiring manager reads everything. At a 30,000-person company an ATS and a recruiter see it first.
You're under-qualified on paper but genuinely strong. The letter is where you make the argument the resume can't.

It matters much less when:

The role is high-volume and the process is automated.
You have a referral. The referral has already done the letter's job.
Your resume maps cleanly onto the posting. When the fit is obvious, a letter mostly adds surface area for mistakes.

The practical rule: write a real letter for roles you actively want, skip the optional ones where you're an obvious match, and never send a generic one. A generic cover letter is worse than none — it demonstrates that you'd send the same thing anywhere.

What a reader is doing with it

If it gets read at all, it gets four to ten seconds first. In that window the reader is answering three questions:

Does this person understand what this job is?
Do they have evidence they can do it?
Is there a specific reason they applied here?

If your first two lines don't start answering those, the rest is decoration. The most common failure is spending the opening paragraph announcing that you're applying — information the reader already has.

The four-paragraph structure

Paragraph 1: the hook (2–3 sentences)

Name the role, then immediately state the most relevant thing about you. No "I am writing to express my interest."

❌ "I am writing to express my strong interest in the Senior Product Designer position at Figma, which I found on LinkedIn. I believe my skills and experience make me an excellent candidate."

✅ "I've spent four years designing collaborative editing interfaces — most recently leading the multiplayer redesign at Notion, which cut time-to-first-edit for new documents by about 40%. I'd like to do that work on FigJam."

The second version establishes the domain, the evidence, and the specific target in three lines.

Paragraph 2: the proof (4–6 sentences)

One story, not a list. Pick the single most relevant thing you've done and tell it with specifics: what the problem was, what you did, what happened.

The mistake is summarising your resume in prose. The resume is already attached. This paragraph exists to add the context a bullet point can't carry — why the problem was hard, what you chose, what it cost.

Paragraph 3: the why-here (3–4 sentences)

The paragraph that separates real letters from templates, and the one people fake most obviously.

"I've long admired your commitment to innovation" is a sentence about no company in particular. Instead, refer to something you could only know by paying attention: a product decision, a technical post from their engineering blog, a recent launch, a specific problem their market is facing.

"Your decision to keep FigJam's object model separate from Figma's rather than unifying them is the kind of trade-off I've argued for and lost before — it costs you consistency and buys you the ability to move fast on a fundamentally different canvas. I'd like to work somewhere that makes that call."

You cannot write that without having thought about the product for ten minutes. That's the point.

Paragraph 4: the close (1–2 sentences)

Short and unapologetic. No "thank you for taking the time to consider my application, I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience."

"Happy to walk through the multiplayer work in more detail — the failure modes were more interesting than the launch."

The full example

Dear Hiring Team,

I've spent four years designing collaborative editing interfaces — most recently leading the multiplayer redesign at Notion, which cut time-to-first-edit for new documents by about 40%. I'd like to do that work on FigJam.

The multiplayer project started as a performance complaint and turned into a model problem. Users said the editor felt "laggy" with more than five people in a document, but the latency numbers were fine; what was actually happening was that cursor and selection updates were competing visually with the user's own edits, so people lost their place. We rebuilt the presence layer around a rule that other people's activity should never move anything under your cursor, which meant giving up some fidelity in how remote selections rendered. It was contentious internally — it made the demo look worse — but session length in multi-user documents went up 25% in the quarter after launch, and the "laggy" reports stopped despite no change in actual latency.

Your decision to keep FigJam's object model separate from Figma's rather than unifying them is the kind of trade-off I've argued for and lost before — it costs you consistency and buys you the ability to move fast on a canvas with genuinely different constraints. I've also been following the cursor chat work, which solves a problem we handled badly at Notion by bolting comments onto a system that didn't want them.

Happy to walk through the multiplayer work in more detail — the failure modes were more interesting than the launch.

Best, Priya Raghavan

Around 280 words. Every paragraph does one job, and no sentence in it could be sent to a different company unchanged.

Rules that hold

One page, always. 250–400 words is the target. Nobody has ever complained that a cover letter was too short.

Address a person if you can find one. "Dear Hiring Team" is fine. "To Whom It May Concern" is dated. Guessing wrong on a name is worse than either.

Mirror the posting's vocabulary without parroting it. If they say "customer success" and you say "account management", you're describing the same work in a language they'll have to translate.

Match the format to the channel. In a form field, no address block, no date — start at "Dear". As an attachment, a light header with your name and contact details.

Proofread the company name. It is the single most common fatal error in cover letters, and it comes from reusing yesterday's draft.

On using AI to write it

An AI draft is a good way to get past a blank page and a bad way to finish. The failure is specific: generated letters are fluent, structurally correct, and completely interchangeable. They produce exactly the "why-here" paragraph that reads like it was written about no company at all — because it was.

What works is using it for the mechanical parts — pulling the requirements out of a posting, matching them against your experience, drafting the proof paragraph from bullets you supply — then writing paragraph three yourself. That's the one that costs ten minutes of actual thought and it's the one a reader notices.

Terview's cover letter tool works this way: it reads the posting and your resume, drafts the structure and the evidence paragraph from your real experience, and leaves the company-specific argument for you to make. If a letter comes out sounding like it could go to anyone, it isn't finished.

The test

Read your letter and ask: could I send this to a different company by changing the name?

If yes, paragraph three isn't doing its job, and paragraph three is the reason to write a cover letter at all.

How to Write a Cover Letter That Actually Gets Read