I would go as far as saying that attaching a generic, AI-ish cover letter is a) disrespectful and b) far worse than attaching no cover latter at all.

It's disrespectful because it's essentially a fake/empty message (often a regurgitation of the CV) and a bet that the receiving side will be dumb enough not to notice.

I occasinally use cover letters to highlight super specific things that called my attention or that make me a particularly well-suited candidate.

We empathize your point that a generic AI-ish cover letter adds no value to society.

That's the reason we designed a system that generates cover letters as personalized as possible. These are displayed in a rich text editor, as we encourage our users to use it as a skeleton and not as a final version.

I used to agree wholly, until I began reading accounts from hiring managers who don't read a single fucking word of a single cover letter - with AI or otherwise.

Really burned me up.

I still recommend a proper, well-considered cover letter.

Just wonder if I'm doing the candidate a disservice, based on what I'm hearing.

Does anyone read cover letters?

The practice originated from when we printed out resumes and literally needed a sheet of paper to cover a resume for privacy purposes. In modern times I am never printing resumes; they are just a PDF on my computer.

I've been hired and the quality of my cover letter was specifically cited as a reason (also later confirmed by the HR lady who tried to hit me up when she was really drunk, when she kept banging on about it for some reason, but that's a different story).

So some are reading them at least, n=1 etc. I usually use them to supplement my CV, by pointing out things that are relevant for this specific position, or listing things that aren't on the CV (and usually shouldn't be on the CV) but still relevant, like a specific open source project I contributed to, or something from my personal life that relates.

It seems like in practice it’s basically used as a filter for resume spammers. If the cover letter is required then it means the person was willing to spend 20 mins of their day applying for this specific job, which is a bit too expensive for people applying to hundreds of jobs and seeing what lands

Seems like this is not a great filter anymore with tools like this and generally LLMs that can generate believable cover letters en masse.

I’ve been reading covers letters for most applicants we receive. Generally we get 25-40 applicants (IT management or specialists positions) and if the CV looks half decent I’ll always read the cover letter.

I'm working on something similar that can be tried for free without signing up; https://regexgpt.app/tool/coverletter/

The idea is to remix your current cover letter by using the company's description and job description to adapt it to the position that your are apply for. It's not perfect and you have to "clean up" some of the hallucinations but it does give you a big head start.

I'll never trust these services, you already collect enough information by visiting the site and then want people to upload their entire employment history.

Unless I can run it entirely locally, with no internet, that'll always be a hard pass from me.

As we indicate in our website, your data is private, and we never share it with any third parties.

We hate that idea too of reselling private data.

The concept of using a database is to simply improve user experience.

I don't really get why we even bother with cover letters anymore. Fortunately I see more and more companies places that explicitly discourage a cover letter when applying.