Have you ever wondered, if your Resume is enough to present all your professional and academic achievements as well as personality traits before the interviewer? If you feel that you have something more that you would like to present before the interviewer, you need to draft an effective cover letter.
Wondering what a cover letter is and how it can help your cause of winning a face-to-face job interview? In this video, we shall try to answer all the questions related to interview cover letter in detail.
What is a Cover Letter?
A cover letter is a one-page document that is prepared by the job interview candidate in order to better present their academic and professional accomplishments before the interview panel. The document is flexible and dynamic in nature, as compared to the Resume. And therefore can also highlight the career summary, personality traits and career goals or ambitions of the interview candidate before the hiring manager.
Why should you include a Cover Letter?
The key advantage of including a cover letter along with your Job Resume is to highlight your career goals and ambitions before the interview panel or the interviewer. Penning down your thoughts about career growth and the way you want to groom your professional journey, helps interviewers understand if your ambitions and the organization’s goals are in sync or not. It also gives the interviewers a fair-bit of idea about where to place you in the organizational hierarchy.
Format of a Job Cover Letter
An ideal cover letter for a job interview candidate would consist of three paragraphs only i.e. Introduction, Body and Conclusion.
Introduction
As the title suggests, the introductory paragraph of your cover letter would give you the opportunity to introduce yourself to the interviewer. In this paragraph, you must answer questions such as Who are you? Why are you writing this cover letter? Why should the interviewer continue reading your cover letter?
So in the first para, just introduce yourself, and mention the job position in which you are interested. In addition to this, you can also highlight why you are interested in a particular position in this particular company.
Body
The second paragraph consists of the Body content of the cover letter. Here’s where you can highlight your skill, strengths, education, qualifications and/or experience. This will help your cause of strengthening your case of justifying why you an ideal fit for the company and the position for which you have sent out the resume and the cover letter. The more refined and carefully crafted the body section of your cover letter, the better are your chances of winning a face-to-face interview.
Conclusion
The final paragraph of the interview cover letter is dedicated to summing up the discussion and requesting the interviewer to consider your profile for a face-to-face interview round. You can also mention your contact details and where and when can the hiring manager contact you to take the job discussion forward.
In a competitive job market that interviewers are faced with today, a cover letter comes across as an ideal tool to help one’s cause of connecting with the hiring manager on a personal note. While a job resumes are specific to the format that a particular industry follows, a cover letter gives a bit more flexibility to the candidates to present their case before the interviewers and thereby increases the chance of winning a face-to-face interview.