The cover letter mistakes that actually cost you something

Lists of cover letter mistakes tend to treat a wrong company name and a slightly long third paragraph as comparable problems, and most of them appear while adapting a letter to a new posting. They are not. One of them ends the application in the first second and the other costs you a fraction of the reader's patience.

The fatal one: the wrong employer

A letter carrying another company's name is finished before the second line. It is not read as carelessness, it is read as evidence that the application was not really about them, which is usually accurate. Nothing later in the letter recovers it.

It is almost entirely a disease of adaptation. Somebody takes last week's letter, updates the opening, misses the third paragraph, and sends it. The structural defence is to generate the header and the greeting from fields rather than editing them in the body, which is how the cover letter builder works: the company and role you enter under Details & drafting produce the recipient block and the greeting, and the Before you send checklist on Review & download shows the recipient and role the finished letter is addressed to.

Expensive habit one: restating the résumé

The reader has both documents. A paragraph that repeats your employment history in sentences has spent forty words telling them something they read ten seconds ago. The proof paragraphs exist for what the résumé could not carry: the result behind the line, the decision behind the result.

Expensive habit two: adjectives about yourself

Hard-working. Detail-oriented. A strong communicator with excellent interpersonal skills. Every letter in the pile contains them, none of them can be checked, and a reader discounts them automatically. The replacement is always the same: one thing you did, with the result attached. What belongs in a letter goes through the swap in detail.

Expensive habit three: claiming what the evidence cannot support

A letter that asserts a tool you have read about is a letter that will be found out in twenty minutes of interview, and the cost is higher than the gap would have been. The engine here will not do it for you: the proof sentences are selected from your own résumé, Details on each paragraph shows the line each one came from, and when the posting asks for something your résumé cannot show, the draft says so in one plain sentence instead of claiming it.

Reading that sentence is not pleasant and it is the most useful line in the draft. Those are the questions you will be asked. Naming one and saying what you are doing about it is honest; asserting it is the mistake.

Expensive habit four: the letter that never arrives at a point

An opening that defines a quality, a second paragraph that restates the posting, a third that describes a temperament, and a close that hopes to hear soon. Nothing in it is false and nothing in it is about you. This is the commonest letter in any pile and the reason cover letters have the reputation they do.

The repair is mechanical. Delete every sentence that does not contain something you did, and see what is left. If the answer is two sentences, the letter was two sentences long and pretending otherwise was the mistake.

The mistakes that are matters of taste

Whether to use "Yours sincerely" or "Kind regards". Whether the date goes above or below the recipient. Whether a design has a masthead. Reasonable people differ and no application has turned on any of them. The closing page gives the conventions for the ones worth knowing, and then the subject is closed.

What the builder checks, and what it leaves to you

Before the download, Review & download shows the finished letter beside a short Before you send checklist: the recipient and role it is addressed to, the signature, and the length of the body in words. Under the letter, each paragraph's Details lists its sentences with the line of your résumé each came from, or marks a sentence as a connective that asserts nothing.

Those are facts about your document rather than an opinion about your candidacy. None of them stop the download, and the checklist says why in its own words: changes you make are saved as written, and any claim you add is yours to check.

The two checks worth doing yourself

Read it aloud once. Every sentence you stumble on is a sentence a reader will stumble on, and it catches more than a spellchecker does. Then read the first line of each paragraph on its own; if that sequence does not make an argument, the paragraphs are in the wrong order. Both take under a minute, and between them they catch most of what is left after the measurements above.

The mistake of sending the same letter twice

Not to the same employer, which is rare, but to two employers in the same small industry who talk to each other. A letter whose reason paragraph is generic enough to be reused is a letter that says nothing about either company, and in a field where the hiring managers know one another, that is occasionally discovered.

The proof paragraphs can and should be reused, because they are facts about you. The reason paragraph cannot, because it is a claim about them. Keeping that line clear is what makes reuse safe, and it is the same line the builder draws between evidence, which it selects, and motivation, which it asks you for and never invents.