The letter engine selects your sentences; it never writes one
Every cover letter tool in this category generates prose. This free one ranks the sentences you already wrote and picks the ones that answer the posting.
— the letter can only say what the evidence says.
Ask any of the large résumé sites for a cover letter and you get generated prose: fluent, confident, and describing a person the generator has inferred. The sentences are grammatically about you and evidentially about nobody. Recruiters have been reading them for two years now.
The cover letter builder here cannot do that, because the engine behind it has no way to write a sentence of evidence.
What it actually does
It reads your résumé into candidate evidence lines, throws away contact rows, section labels and anything with no verb in it, and scores what is left against the posting: does this line answer something the job asked for, does it carry a number, how many distinct skills does it touch. Then it keeps up to eight, refusing a line that adds nothing the earlier picks did not already cover. Each one is kept with the index of the line it came from, and the words around them are named connectives that assert nothing.
The draft we ran
We connected the résumé of Ada Fennimore, an invented backend engineer, and pasted an invented posting for a payments platform role at a company that does not exist. Details & drafting reported nine requirements recognised in the posting before anything was drafted. The draft came back, measured on 26 September, at 200 words in six blocks, with fourteen sentences: ten of them traced to a numbered line of the résumé, the other four connectives such as the greeting and the close.
What it refuses to say
Requirements in the posting that the résumé cannot support are named once and never asserted. Our draft named three, Reporting, Elasticsearch and Scala, in one sentence as things not used in these roles. That behaviour has its own piece: the gaps list is the interview.
What the review shows, and what it leaves to you
Before the download, Review & download shows the finished letter beside a Before you send checklist: the recipient and role, the signature and the length. It does not score the letter and makes no prediction about the employer. What it does instead is make every claim checkable: Details on each paragraph lists its sentences with the résumé line each came from, so the figures in the letter, 31 per cent, 14 services, 2.3 million requests, 99.97 per cent, can each be walked back to the line that states them.
What Details and drafting asks for, and what it will not ask for
The role, the company and the posting, with the recipient's name, title and city as optional extras. The posting is read for requirements, and the builder tells you how many it recognised. The evidence is the résumé you connected, and the letter cannot claim anything outside it.
There is no field asking why you want the job, and that is deliberate. The reason is the only part of a cover letter a selection engine could never produce, so it is left to you: two sentences of your own in the Opening paragraph are a better use of your effort than any amount of polishing the proof.
What this costs you
A selected letter is plainer than a generated one. It will not open with a paragraph about your lifelong admiration for a company you found on a job board, because you did not write that sentence and the engine cannot. If your résumé has no achievements in it, the letter will be short, which is a useful thing to discover in private rather than in an inbox. What you get in exchange is a letter that cannot embarrass you in an interview, because every claim in it is a line you can already defend. The provenance is one click away on each paragraph, as shown in what evidence tracing looks like, and a letter with no name on it says so, which is the unsigned letter rule.
Draft one from your own evidence
Paste the posting, connect your résumé, and read the draft it selects. Free, in any of the 12 designs.
Open the cover letter builderSee the tracingQuestions
- Does this use a language model
- No. The letter engine has no network call and no vendor, and the response it returns says so in its own metadata. It runs the same offline as online, which is part of why it is free.
- Where do the sentences come from
- From your résumé. The engine reads it into candidate evidence lines, ranks them against the posting and keeps up to eight, each carried with the index of the line it came from.
- What if it cannot find good evidence
- It writes less. A line that adds nothing the earlier picks did not already evidence is refused, and a thin résumé produces a short letter rather than a padded one.
- Does it change the tone
- It drafts in one plain, direct voice, and every paragraph is editable. Rewording is yours; what the builder keeps fixed is where each claim came from, and Details on a paragraph can restore the wording built from your evidence.
- Can I write my own reason for wanting the job
- Yes, in the Opening paragraph, in your own words. The product never invents a reason for wanting the job.
Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 22 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.