Is "Dear Sir or Madam" still acceptable

The United Kingdom's National Careers Service gives it as the fallback when you cannot find a name (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk). It is a fallback rather than a first choice, and the same page says to try to address the letter to someone by name.

What about "To whom it may concern"

It is understood everywhere and it reads as a form letter, because that is where most readers have met it. If you have no name, the named fallback above is the one the guidance actually gives.

Should I use a first name

Only where the employer has used first names with you already. A surname with the appropriate title is the safe default in a first approach, and nobody has ever been rejected for being slightly formal.

The posting hides the employer. What now

Address the hiring team and say nothing you cannot support. A letter to an unnamed employer through an agency is still a letter that has to make its case on evidence, and the proof paragraphs do not change.

Does the builder fill this in

It writes a greeting from the company you entered, and the greeting is an editable block like every other one. Type a name over it and the letter updates as you type.

Guide · Cover letter

How to address a cover letter when you have a name, and when you do not

Government careers guidance in the United Kingdom is direct about this: try to address the letter to someone by name. Here is how to find the name, and what to write when there is not one.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— a name, or an honest fallback. Nothing in between.

The greeting is four words long and it is the part of a cover letter people spend the most time worrying about. The worry is not unreasonable. It is the first thing on the page after the date, and it is the one line that says whether you found out who you were writing to.

What the official guidance says

The United Kingdom's National Careers Service, which is government careers guidance rather than a recruiter's blog, states it plainly: "It's important to try to address your cover letter to someone by name." The same page gives "Dear Sir or Madam" as what to use when you cannot find one (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk). That is the whole rule, and it is worth following because it is both cheap and checkable.

Where the name usually is

The posting itself. Read to the bottom. Contact details for questions are often in the last paragraph, under a heading nobody reads.
The employer's own site. A team page, an about page, or the page for the department the role sits in.
The application address. A named mailbox in the apply-to line is a name.
The job title above the vacancy. If the posting says the role reports to the Head of Reliability, that title is enough to find the person.

Five minutes is the right amount of effort. If the name has not appeared by then, it is not hidden, it is not published, and the fallback is not a failure.

When you have the name

Use the surname with the title the person uses about themselves. Copy the spelling from the source, including accents, and check it twice; a misspelled name undoes the credit you earned by finding it. If the person's title is ambiguous or you cannot tell which form of address they use, the full name on its own is a clean solution that offends nobody.

When you do not

Address the hiring team. "Dear Hiring Team" is what the letters on this site produce from the company name you enter, and it is honest: it says you know who is reading and not which of them. The alternative the national guidance gives is the traditional fallback. Both are better than guessing a name and getting it wrong.

What to avoid is the greeting that tries to hide the gap. A letter addressed to a department that does not exist, or to a title invented from the posting, is a letter that has made something up on line one, which is a poor place to start an argument built on evidence.

The agency problem

Where an agency has posted the role and concealed the employer, you are writing two letters at once: one to a recruiter who will read it quickly, and one to an employer who may read it later. Write it for the employer. Name the role as the posting names it, keep the proof paragraphs specific, and let the recruiter forward a letter that already works. A speculative letter, sent where no vacancy has been advertised, has the same problem in a stronger form and the same solution.

How this works in the builder

In the cover letter builder, the greeting is the first numbered block in the paragraph list beside the letter. It is generated from the company you entered and it is editable like every other block, so replacing it with a name takes one edit and the letter beside it changes as you type. The proof paragraphs underneath are separate: they carry the line of your evidence they came from, and editing the greeting does not disturb them.

The recipient block above the greeting, which carries the company and the role, is part of the design rather than the prose. The header and date page covers what belongs there and how the different designs place it.

One more check before you send

Change the greeting last, and read the whole letter after you do. The most common way a wrong name reaches an employer is not carelessness at the start, it is a letter adapted from another application where everything else was updated. The check step on this site reports the named opportunity it found in your draft, the role and the company together, which is one more place to catch it before it leaves.

If you are adapting rather than writing fresh, tailoring the résumé to the posting goes through the same discipline on the other document.

Spelling, and the two-minute check

Copy the name from the source rather than typing it from memory, accents included, and then read it once against the source again. Names with two common spellings are the ones that go wrong, and a reader whose name you misspelled has been given a reason to doubt the care in everything underneath.

The same applies to the company. An abbreviation, a legal suffix or an ampersand written the wrong way is a small error that lands on the most visible line of the page. Both checks together take about two minutes, which is a proportionate amount of attention for the part of the letter a reader meets first.

Put the greeting where it belongs

The greeting is block 01 in the builder's paragraph list, editable like every other block, and the letter beside it changes as you type.

Open the cover letter builder See the 12 letter designs

Questions

Is "Dear Sir or Madam" still acceptable: The United Kingdom's National Careers Service gives it as the fallback when you cannot find a name (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk). It is a fallback rather than a first choice, and the same page says to try to address the letter to someone by name.
What about "To whom it may concern": It is understood everywhere and it reads as a form letter, because that is where most readers have met it. If you have no name, the named fallback above is the one the guidance actually gives.
Should I use a first name: Only where the employer has used first names with you already. A surname with the appropriate title is the safe default in a first approach, and nobody has ever been rejected for being slightly formal.
The posting hides the employer. What now: Address the hiring team and say nothing you cannot support. A letter to an unnamed employer through an agency is still a letter that has to make its case on evidence, and the proof paragraphs do not change.
Does the builder fill this in: It writes a greeting from the company you entered, and the greeting is an editable block like every other one. Type a name over it and the letter updates as you type.

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 20 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.