Two full cover letter examples with the reasoning behind each paragraph, plus the structure to reuse and what to change per role. Free, no sign-up.
Software Engineer
A software engineer cover letter example with the reasoning behind each paragraph, what engineering managers screen for, and how to adapt it per posting.
Read the full letter and the reasoning →
IT Support
An IT support cover letter example for help desk and technical support roles, with what support managers screen for and how to show ticket ownership.
Read the full letter and the reasoning →
Name the role and give one concrete reason you are worth reading past the first line. Something specific from the posting works better than a statement about your enthusiasm, because it proves the letter was written for this application.
Connect your experience to what the job actually needs, in the job's own words. This is where the terms from the posting belong, used in real sentences rather than listed.
One relevant win with enough context to be believable: what the constraint was, what you did, what changed. One well-told example beats three summarised ones.
State what you would like to happen next and stop. A close that apologises for taking up time, or repeats the whole letter in miniature, wastes the last thing the reader sees.
Use these pages to keep moving through the same topic cluster instead of bouncing back into generic advice.
Most cover letter examples fail in the same way: they are written to be admired rather than adapted, so the sentences that look most quotable are the ones every hiring manager has already read a hundred times. The two examples below are deliberately plain. What matters is the reasoning attached to each paragraph, because that is the part you reuse when the next posting is different.
Step 1
The first read tells you whether to apply. The second is the one that matters for the letter: look for the problem behind the requirements. A posting that lists monitoring, on-call, and incident response three different ways is describing a team that has been burned by reliability. That is the thing to write about.
Step 2
Choose the example that matches the posting's biggest priority, then give it room. If the job emphasises collaboration, pick the story that shows teamwork even if a solo project was technically harder. Relevance beats impressiveness, because the reader is matching you against a specific gap.
Step 3
Fold the role's own terms into your own sentences where they genuinely apply. This keeps the letter readable for a person and recognisable to the screening software. Pasting requirement text back at the employer is obvious and does the opposite of what it intends.
Step 4
Between 250 and 400 words is the range that gets read start to finish. Remove any paragraph that does not name something you did or something the role needs. Most first drafts lose a third of their length without losing anything else.
If a reader learns nothing from the letter that the resume did not already say, the letter was not worth attaching. The point of the letter is the context a bullet cannot carry: why the decision was hard, what the constraint was, what you would do differently.
Every letter says this, which means it carries no information. Worse, it spends the one sentence most likely to be read on something about you rather than something about the role. Lead with the specific instead.
Hiring managers spot it immediately, usually within a sentence, because a letter written for nobody in particular reads that way. If you are applying at volume, keep the middle paragraph and rewrite the opening each time; that is a ten-minute job and it is the part that shows.
It still appears in templates and it reads as though you did not look. Check the company site and LinkedIn first. When you genuinely cannot find a name, address the team or the role instead: Dear Hiring Team, or Dear Engineering Hiring Manager.
Next Step
Use the free analyzer to get your ATS score, then move into job match, rewrite, and cover letter workflows when you are ready to tailor applications faster.