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The Cover Letter

With my recent failure to land a job still stinging, I’ve decided to adjust my method for job-hunting. Applying for dozens of jobs in a given day seems like a good strategy on the surface, blanketing the universe with my resume, in the hopes that a few places will get back to me, but I have to face facts: I’ve received three requests for interviews in the past two months, and because of my willingness to apply for virtually everything, the two I decided not to interview for were either part-time or a shit job that I probably wouldn’t have applied for had I read the listing more closely.

And most of this, I believe, has to do with my sketchy, working-around-college-classes employment history, and the fact that I’ve essentially created a generic cover letter template that makes it easy to add a sentence or two to tailor myself to what they’re looking for and a few blank spots to add a company name and job title, so as to create the illusion of originality. It doesn’t really explain too much about me or why I want the job, or why I think I can do the job, because when you’re applying for that many jobs, it gets extremely time-consuming. As it is, I fall behind in sending out the applications because what little I do to alter the cover letter (and occasionally alter the work history) takes awhile.

And then, at random, I got an e-mail from my cousin. She’s a few years younger than me, and she was going to film school briefly but decided to drop that to go to the community college while doing as many internships as she can. Lucky for her, she grew up just outside of New York City, so there are a lot of internships to be had.

The e-mail she said was a correspondence with some internship guy in west New Jersey. I’m not sure why she sent it to me — she’s worked half a dozen internships before, and she’s mentioned them in passing, and I didn’t see anything special about this one that would necessitate sending the entire correspondence. But I’m glad she did, because her initial e-mail contained an astonishing cover letter, whoring herself to the fullest, going into an excess of details about why her work history sucks, why she dropped out of film school, but why she’d be totally awesome for this internship. I know from experience that, when there are a lot of internships available, they’re exceptionally easy to get — the 450,000 interviews I had in Los Angeles are a testament to that — but I’m not going to tell her that, because she’s proud and pleased as punch. I congratulated her, because it is awesome. If nothing else, I’ll have some coattails to ride in a few years when she actually gets paying industry jobs.

But the main thing I focused on was that ingenious cover letter, and I realized what mine was missing: heart. I’m basically sending a generic form-letter, tailored on the surface to a job but still utterly generic. Worse than that, it does a pretty horrendous job of selling me, which is the purpose of the cover letter.

This e-mail also happened to correspond with a writing job I found for a new MMORPG, produced by a reputable company outside of Seattle. Now, personally, I think MMORPGs are about the lowest of the low as far as video games are concerned, but I do think it’d be fun to write one. More than that, it’d open a couple of doors in the nerdy world of writing video games, so perhaps I could work my way up to writing for a cool game.

But here’s the problem: I don’t know shit about writing video games. I imagine it can’t be terribly different from writing screenplays, which I know how to do, but I was sending a piece of short fiction as my writing sample. I realized for this job, which I really want, I need to exploit pretty much everything I have to offer. It ain’t much, but it works: I have the work history in Seattle, so I can hop on the idea that I’d love to move back there (I wouldn’t, but I also wouldn’t say no, which is why I’m trolling for jobs out there); I’ve got the brief but seemingly impressive work in Hollywood; I have my college career and the illusion that I’m a young go-getter; and I have my writing sample, which will hopefully provide evidence of versatility in my writing (it’s not a screenplay, though college and internships prove I know that realm; and I made up some bullshit about the idea that an MMORPG creates a universe, which essentially was what I did in the story).

In short, I rambled on about why I felt I could do the job, but I did so with an excess of what my cover letter previously lacked: a desire to do this job to the best of my ability, and totally personalized for this one job. Since then, I’ve done that with five or six other decent jobs I’ve found. I’ve only started doing this on Friday afternoon, so we’ll see if it actually works or if it’s another dead end. I have to assume that, once again, my laziness did me in, so I hope that rectifying said laziness will help. Probably not, but a man can dream.

Posted by Stan on February 19, 2006 5:10 PM  | Permalink | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace | Digg It