Why you should never send a long cover letter

When I receive a business email longer than two paragraphs, I always start to panic a little. It gets even worse when people use bold words in a message. As a heading, fine; in a sentence: a tad scary. Why is that? Probably because I feel like I have to do a lot after such an email. Because if someone took the trouble to use italics, bold, or underline, there must be work involved. And this is exactly why you should also send a short yet powerful cover letter. You don't want to scare off future employers, do you?

Emailing is actually just the new meeting. They often take too long, you can cut half of it out, and they always come at a time that is just not convenient. You don't want to invoke all this when sending an application. A recruiter typically looks at a letter for only six (!) seconds, and it hasn't even been said that you get that long. In that time, someone scans your letter, and that's why you want to score.

Make sure your very first sentence immediately grabs attention. Start strong, write something that catches the eye. Once you have that trigger, the chance is greater that the person you are writing to will read to the end. Do you want to work with subheadings? Make sure they are clear and concise. And finally: conclude with the clear message that you can fill A4 pages about yourself and the job, but would rather explain why you fit this position . All this can be scanned in six seconds, while an essay of pages is simply not scannable.

By the way, don't make the mistake of thinking that it should be short and powerful and therefore also easy. It is, of course, the intention that everything in those paragraphs is correct, comes across as intelligent, and has substance. In fact, writing that short letter is therefore more complicated than writing a long one, indeed. Just like asking that one important question in your conversation.

PS: What is worse than a long email? Being in CC. Apparently, the sender wants you to know, maybe do something, but it's not entirely certain. So, especially do not send your cover letter to multiple people, as the chance is high that you will just end up in the pile everywhere.