Do speculative letters work

Sometimes, and we have no figure to offer you because we have not measured one. What is structurally true is that a speculative letter competes with nothing, which is the whole of its advantage.

What do I put in the role field

The role you are proposing, named as an employer would name it. A speculative letter that does not name a job is asking the reader to invent one, which nobody does.

The builder wants a job description. I do not have one

Write the one you are answering. Three or four lines of what the work involves is enough for the evidence selection to have something to aim at, and it forces you to be specific about what you are asking for.

The person who would manage the role, where you can find them. The greeting page covers how to find a name and what to write when you cannot.

How long should it be

Shorter than a normal letter. A reader who did not ask for it gives it less time, and one specific paragraph is worth three general ones.

Guide · Cover letter

Writing a speculative cover letter when there is no vacancy

A speculative letter is harder than a normal one for a structural reason: there is no posting, so nothing tells you which of your evidence matters.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— no posting means you write the posting first.

Every other kind of application has a posting, and a posting does more work than people notice. It names the role, lists the requirements, and therefore tells you which four things out of your fifteen are the relevant ones. Take it away and the letter has nothing to aim at.

Which is why most speculative letters read the same: a paragraph of admiration for the company, a paragraph of general competence, and a request to be kept in mind. None of it is checkable, none of it names a job, and the reader has nothing to do with it.

Write the posting first

Before writing a word of the letter, write three or four lines describing the job you are proposing. What the work involves, what it would be responsible for, what it would need. It does not have to be right. It has to exist, because it turns an open question into a thing that can be answered.

This is also what the cover letter builder needs from you. The details step asks for a role, a company and a job description, all three required, and it reports back whether what you pasted reads like a real posting. For a speculative application, the description you write is the one you are answering, and writing it is most of the thinking.

Name a role, not a relationship

"I would welcome any opportunity" asks the reader to do the work of finding you a job. Almost nobody has time for that. "I am writing about a payments reliability role, which I do not think you have advertised" asks them to make a single yes-or-no judgement, which is a decision a busy person can actually make.

If you genuinely do not know what the role would be called there, use the name it has in the wider industry. Being slightly wrong about the title costs nothing; being vague costs the letter.

Then the letter is a normal letter

Two or three proof paragraphs from your own evidence, each with a result attached, aimed at the description you just wrote. A short reason that is specific to this employer. A close and a signature. The structure is identical to any other cover letter, and the proof paragraphs still carry the line of the evidence they came from.

The gaps behave differently and usefully. Because you wrote the description, the requirements your evidence cannot support are the ones you invented and then failed to meet, which is a signal that the role you described is not quite the role you should be proposing. Adjusting the description until the gaps are small is a legitimate use of an afternoon.

The reason paragraph carries more weight here

In an ordinary application the reason is a nice addition. In a speculative one it is the answer to the obvious question, which is why this company and not the forty others doing similar work. It has to be specific: something they have built, published, shipped or changed that you can describe accurately.

This is the point where a speculative letter is closest to a motivation letter, and the same warning applies. A reason that could be pasted into a letter to a competitor is not a reason. The field for it in this product is optional and its content is used exactly as written, and nothing invents one for you.

Getting it to a person

A speculative letter to a general enquiries mailbox has a poor journey ahead of it. Find the person who would manage the role: a team page, a talk they gave, the department the work sits in. The addressing page covers the search and the honest fallbacks when it fails.

Attach the résumé anyway. The letter proposes and the résumé is the evidence, and a reader who becomes interested in the first will open the second within seconds.

Keep it short and expect silence

Shorter than an advertised application. A reader who did not ask for the letter gives it less time, so one specific paragraph beats three general ones. The check step reports the reading length against a guide of 140 to 420 words, and a speculative letter belongs at the bottom of that range.

Most speculative letters get no reply, and that is not a verdict on the letter. It is a property of writing to somebody with no vacancy and no process for handling your message. The ones that work tend to arrive when a team has just started thinking about a problem you named, which is timing rather than skill. Writing a good one costs twenty minutes and the downside is nothing at all.

Timing is most of the outcome

A speculative letter lands well when a team has just acquired a problem you have solved before, and badly the rest of the time, which is why the same letter can produce a conversation in March and silence in January. Nothing in the writing changes that.

What you can do is improve the odds cheaply. Send it after a piece of public news that creates the work you are proposing: a funding round, a new market, a product launch, a regulation coming into force. That also solves the reason paragraph, because the news is a specific thing you can name accurately and nobody else applying has thought to mention.

Write the role, then answer it

The builder needs a role, a company and a description. For a speculative letter, write the description of the job you are proposing.

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Questions

Do speculative letters work: Sometimes, and we have no figure to offer you because we have not measured one. What is structurally true is that a speculative letter competes with nothing, which is the whole of its advantage.
What do I put in the role field: The role you are proposing, named as an employer would name it. A speculative letter that does not name a job is asking the reader to invent one, which nobody does.
The builder wants a job description. I do not have one: Write the one you are answering. Three or four lines of what the work involves is enough for the evidence selection to have something to aim at, and it forces you to be specific about what you are asking for.
Who do I send it to: The person who would manage the role, where you can find them. The greeting page covers how to find a name and what to write when you cannot.
How long should it be: Shorter than a normal letter. A reader who did not ask for it gives it less time, and one specific paragraph is worth three general ones.

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.