15-Minute Cover Letter distills revolutionary and proven cover letter advice into six quick chapters about writing and using cover letters and other job search correspondence. The book offers a collection of dozens of professionally written cover letter samples along with step-by-step advice for creating attention-getting letters of your own. Bonus content offers tip on resume writing and job search success.
15-Minute Cover Letter: Write an Effective Cover Letter
This book will teach you how to write personalized, effective cover letters very quickly. We don’t want you to get frustrated and bogged down in the process, but neither do we want you to dash off something that is quick but not effective. We give you techniques to help you move rapidly through the opening, middle, and closing sections of your cover letters; we tell you when mail or e-mail is most appropriate; and we tell you what you should do before you write your cover letters to make them truly effective. And we provide lots of sample cover letters to review for ideas to use in your own.
Cover letters are just one important part of the job search, so we also provide information on thank-you letters, e-mail, and other job search correspondence that, when used effectively, can make your transition to a new job smoother and faster. A short but powerful chapter on how you can improve your resume in just 15 minutes is also included, and we close out with a key chapter on job search—what works, what doesn’t, and how you can find a job fast.
After all, changing jobs and changing careers are no longer rare events. Many workers choose to or are forced to look for work every few years. So learning methods that work, and work quickly, will help you the rest of your working life.
You are ready to start your job search—or so you think. You have written a great resume, turned up some promising leads, and now need to send your resume with a cover letter to various people in advance of an interview.
But for too many job seekers, the job search comes to a screeching halt at this point. Questions like these come to mind:
- What should I say in my cover letter?
- Can I write one letter and use it for every situation?
- How much background information should I provide?
- What do they really want to know?
- Do I have to match up perfectly for every requirement in the job posting?
- Should I quickly summarize all my positions?
- Do I have to share information about why I left my last job?
- Do they care about why I’m looking?
- How can I quickly get the attention of busy hiring managers?
- Should I mail or e-mail my cover letter and resume?
It’s no wonder that the task of quickly sending out resumes can become a time-consuming, difficult challenge and a real roadblock to a swift, successful search.
With 15-Minute Cover Letter, we want to change all that. We give you strategies, ideas, and examples that will make the process of producing your cover letters quick, easy, and foolproof. Using these guidelines, you won’t become bogged down in the task of writing and sending an effective cover letter, and you can keep your job search moving ahead.
Because our theme is “quick,” we haven’t loaded down the book with hundreds of examples. Instead, we have given you dozens of good examples that illustrate our key points. These include.
- 70 complete cover letters and thank-you letters.
- Additional samples of language for the opening, middle, and closing sections of your cover letters.
- Worksheets to help you organize and keep track of material for your cover letters.
- Examples of quick notes, JIST Cards (a mini-resume), and job proposals.
- 12 professionally written sample resumes that illustrate our key points for improving your resume.
If you are like most job seekers, you will go immediately to the section of the book that deals with your most pressing need—whether that is how to get a cover letter out the door in the next 15 minutes, how to quickly improve your resume, or how to manage your job search for the fastest, best results.
But we hope you will take the time to skim through all the sections of the book. All components of your job search—your cover letters, resume, follow-up correspondence, search strategy, network contacts, interview responses, and more—are interrelated, so the more proficient and knowledgeable you become in the entire process, the more successful you’ll be.
You can’t accomplish a job search in 15 minutes, but you can accomplish a lot in each 15-minute segment you allot to it—beginning with the 15-minute cover letter.
