Preparing a Cover Letter for an Online Application

Follow the application instructions first

A cover letter may be an attachment, a text field, or an optional document. Use the format requested by the employer. We cannot determine whether a particular employer parses, scores, or simply reads that letter, and a resume score does not answer that question.

Add context instead of repeating the resume

Choose one requirement from the posting and explain a relevant example. Connect your action to the problem you worked on. Use the employer’s terminology only where it accurately describes your experience.

Illustrative paragraph

“For your support operations role, I would bring experience documenting recurring customer issues. In my last role, I grouped incoming tickets by cause and worked with the product team to revise the setup instructions.”

This paragraph names a relevant contribution without inventing a percentage improvement. Replace it with your own evidence; it is not a customer outcome or a tool-generated result.

Check the exported document

Open the final file and verify the employer name, role title, contact details, and reading order. If the application uses a text field, inspect the pasted version because bullets and paragraph breaks may change. Avoid hidden keywords and claims you cannot explain in an interview.

The cover-letter generator can help draft wording from your context. Check every sentence before submitting, especially facts or achievements suggested by AI.

Decide whether the letter is really needed

Read the posting for the word optional, and for any instruction about what to include. When a letter is optional, it is worth writing if you have something specific to add and worth skipping if you would only restate your resume. A short, specific letter beats a long generic one, and a missing letter rarely hurts when it was genuinely optional.

A structure that works in a text box or a file

1. One sentence naming the role and the single strongest reason you fit it.
2. One short paragraph with a relevant example: the problem, what you did, what changed.
3. One sentence connecting that example to something the employer said it needs.
4. A plain closing line and your contact details.

Keep it to roughly 250 to 350 words. That length reads comfortably on screen, survives being pasted into a form, and leaves no room for the filler that makes letters sound alike.

Formatting that survives the upload

• Use a standard font and plain paragraphs, with no tables, columns or text boxes.
• Put your name and contact details in the body, not a header.
• Save as PDF or DOCX exactly as the portal asks, and name the file sensibly.
• If pasting into a field, check line breaks and remove any special characters that turned into symbols.

Match the letter to the role without copying it

Borrow the posting's terms only where they describe work you have done, and put them inside a sentence with an example. Repeating the requirements back verbatim reads as filler to a person and adds nothing a parser needs, since the resume already carries your skills.

After drafting, run the same file through the ATS parser to confirm the text recovers cleanly, and compare the letter and resume with the posting using resume job match to see whether the two tell a consistent story.

Should the cover letter repeat my resume?

No. Its job is to give context a bullet point cannot carry: why this role, why now, and what a specific piece of your experience shows. If a reader learns nothing from the letter that the resume did not already say, it was not worth attaching.

Do applicant tracking systems read cover letters?

It depends on the employer. Some store it as an attachment for a person to open, some parse it, and some ignore it. Since that is not visible from outside, write for a human reader and keep the file clean enough that either kind of system can read it.