Most cover letters are a reworded resume nobody asked for. The short, specific version that actually earns a hiring manager two minutes.
Plenty of hiring managers will tell you they do not read cover letters. What they mean is they do not read bad ones, and almost all of them are bad. A good one still gets read, because a good one is rare enough to stand out in the first two lines.
The bad version is easy to spot. It restates the resume in paragraph form, opens with "I am writing to express my interest," and could be sent to any company with the name swapped out. The reader has seen a hundred of those this month. They skim, they move on, and the letter does nothing.
Here is the version that works.
Open with the company, not yourself
The first sentence should make it obvious you are writing to this company and no other. Name the thing that made you apply: a product they shipped, a problem they are clearly trying to solve, a number from their own job posting. "Your posting says the support team is drowning in tickets, and closing that gap is the kind of work I did for two years at [company]" beats any version that starts with "I."
The opening is the whole game. If the first sentence reads like a template, the reader assumes the rest does too and stops.
Pick one story, not a summary
You are not summarizing your resume. The resume already did that. Pick the single most relevant thing you have done, and tell it in three or four sentences: the situation, what you did, and the result with a number attached. One real story beats five vague claims about being a hard worker.
If the role is about cutting costs, tell the cost-cutting story. If it is about untangling a mess, tell the mess story. Match the story to the job, not to whatever you are proudest of.
Keep it under 200 words
A cover letter is not an essay. Three short paragraphs is plenty: why this company, one proof story, one clear close. The reader is giving you two minutes at most. Respect that and you are already ahead of the person who wrote a full page.
Long letters read as a failure to prioritize. Short and specific reads as someone who knows what matters.
Close with a next step, not a thank-you
End by pointing at the work, not by thanking them for their time. "I would be glad to walk through how I would approach the ticket backlog in the first month" gives them a reason to talk to you. "Thank you for considering my application" gives them a reason to close the tab.
Write the body before the formatting
People burn an hour on margins and fonts and ten minutes on the actual words. Reverse it. The words are what gets read. A clean, single-column layout in a normal font is all the formatting a cover letter needs, the same parsing rules that apply to your resume apply here.
If you would rather start from a structure than a blank page, the Cover Letter & LinkedIn Kit has openers, proof-story templates, and closes you can adapt per role in about fifteen minutes. The rest of the Career & Job Search tools cover the resume, the interview, and the negotiation that comes after.
A cover letter cannot save a weak application. It can move a strong one to the top of the pile, which on a crowded role is the only job it has.