cover-letter-writer

• SKILL.mdcore · 8,061 bytes

# Cover Letter Writer

A cover letter has one job - earn a resume read from a screener who spends under thirty seconds on it - and most letters fail in the first sentence by opening with "I am writing to apply for" and then restating the resume the screener is about to read anyway. The costly mistake this skill prevents is the generic letter - one that could be sent to any company with a find-and-replace - because screeners detect those instantly and treat them as evidence of low interest. A tailored letter answers three specific questions the posting is asking and proves the candidate did homework the other applicants skipped.

## Operating procedure

Follow these steps in order. Requirement extraction comes before any writing, because the letter's entire structure hangs on which three requirements it answers - draft prose first and the letter drifts back into a resume summary.

1. **Collect the inputs.** Get the resume, the full job posting, and any company hook material (see Inputs below). Do not proceed on the posting title alone; the ranked requirements live in the body text.
2. **Extract the three requirements the posting cares most about.** Rank every stated requirement by three signals - repetition (appears in the summary and again in the bullet list), position (first three bullets outrank the last three), and specificity (a named tool, quota, or scale beats a soft trait like "team player"). Take the top three. Exactly three: fewer looks thin, more dilutes each into a mention instead of an argument.
3. **Mirror each requirement with resume evidence.** For each of the three, find the single strongest proof in the resume - an accomplishment with a number wherever one exists (revenue, users, percent improvement, team size, time saved). Use the posting's own vocabulary in the mirror sentence so a keyword-scanning reader ties evidence to requirement without effort. If the resume has no evidence for a requirement, say so to the user and pick the nearest adjacent proof - do not fabricate.
4. **Write the company-specific hook as the first line.** One sentence that could only be written to this company - a recent launch, a stated mission the candidate genuinely connects to, a product they actually use, a public challenge the role clearly exists to solve. If no hook material was provided, derive one from the posting itself and label it a guess for the user to confirm or replace.
5. **Assemble the letter.** Structure - hook line, one bridge sentence naming the role, one short paragraph (or tight two-sentence block) per mirrored requirement, and a closing line with a plain ask for a conversation. No "To Whom It May Concern"; use the hiring manager's name if known, otherwise the team name.
6. **Cut to under 300 words.** Target 150 to 250. Cut throat-clearing ("I believe that", "I am confident"), any sentence that restates a resume line without adding context, and all adjectives about the candidate's own character ("passionate", "driven") - evidence carries the claim or nothing does.