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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

In a third round, why are you even looking at cover letters?

Who is even looking at cover letters at all?

I suspect it depends on the field, but in my experience it’s often a good indicator of success. A shoddy letter betrays a lack of professionalism. If you’re not going to spend 10 minutes running a spell checker it means that either it’s not important to you, so good bye, or that your standards are really low and you will keep producing garbage if I hire you, so good bye as well.

The problem with cover letters is false positive (people who did not write the letter themselves, or who did it to a much higher standard than their usual). But then, that’s what interviews are for.

I did hire a couple of people with either a subpar CV (some good people sometimes end up in dead ends or difficult situations), or cover letter (not everyone is a great writer), or reference (your issues with your former boss are not always your fault), or interview (you can have a bad day), so I would not rely on a single factor. But a combination of 2 dodgy elements is an automatic rejection. Each one tends to surface different aspects.

Consider that job seekers today sometimes have to apply to hundreds of positions before being hired. For most of those applications, they won’t hear anything back. Given that dynamic, would you spend time polishing a cover letter for each application?

My recent job hunt was over 1700 applications.

Nobody is spending 10 minutes writing a cover letter.

Companies that are getting hundreds to thousands of applications are not reading every cover letter.

In my field, certainly. We expect them to prepare a presentation for the interview as well. Our pond is not large enough, there are not hundreds of positions to apply to.

I guess my thing is that I don’t want to jump through hoops, I want to write code. You know how some people are enamored of those little ‘shit tests’ for relationships, they think they’re really clever? I have no patience for that.

Show me who you are and I’ll show you who I am, and if we like eachother, then let’s try to get together and see what we could build together. if the entire interview process is a series of hoops that you dictate I jump through to even have a chance with you, then why should I expect my future with you to be any different? I don’t want that.

I don’t want to write a carefully crafted letter pretending that I want anything other than respect and money and a chance to do work on interesting from a potential employer. I just want to write code. The rest of it is extensive shit testing in my book and I have no patience for that. I don’t put up with that kind of treatment from anyone else - what makes you think dangling money in front of me would change my mind about that?

A guess: First round was "AI" (aka keyword matching), second round was recruiter who doesn't understand anything and doesn't read

First round is phone call prescreen, second round is non-technical interview with a recruiter. No GPT or keyword matching involved.

How am I supposed to learn something about the person?

at the third or fourth round? By talking to them, obviously?

Before I get to talk to them, obviously

You have a CV, three rounds of notes, usually a linkedin profile, and you’re arrogant enough to dismiss people because they had to put up a crappy cover letter to get past your stupid ATS, and you still don’t see how shameful your behavior is.

Lol. If all you can give me is a crap letter that says nothing about you and just lists what I wrote in the ad and how excellent you are at it, then I'm going to go with the people who excitedly told me about their actual experience and related interests. Don't see anything shameful about that.

CV is nice except that most people have a list of "Senior Software Engineer at XYZ" and that's it. Doesn't tell me anything, so again, if that's what you're going with, I'm going to prefer the person who took the time to actually talk about their related experience and interests. LinkedIn is nice but same problem as with CVs.

Seems like you think everyone has perfect detailed CV and LinkedIn profiles... Nope. It's mostly crap that says nothing. If your CV/LinkedIn can take the role of the cover letter then sure, no problem, but I don't see that often.

Not sure how the recruiter's notes about your nice friendly outgoing personality and good English level would help me understand your experience and interests related to the job, but yeah sure lol.

No crappy ATS at our company, BTW. Applications go to the inbox and are handled by real people.

Google, I think that's the 9th round.

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