While some job applications amount to simply uploading a resume and clicking “enter,” others permit or encourage the inclusion of a cover letter. Traditionally, the cover letter is a chance to address the hiring professional with a personal message, highlight aspects of your career and work history that show relevance to the job opening, explain any issues in your background, and secure your spot as an ideal candidate.
Today, the pressure to write a great cover letter is tremendous. Many job seekers are relying on generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to help their cover letter hit the mark. Before using just any AI platform, here are some tips to ensure your cover letter hits the mark using AI to assist:
1. Choose the Right AI Platform
Not all tools are the same. Some focus on image generation (Midjourney, DALL-E, Canva), research (Perplexity, NotebookLM) or text and content (ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Gemini). Some AI platforms are industry standards, and others are more general-use. Look for a specific tool that will help you create the language, tone and message that meets the needs of your career and industry goals.
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2. Write Your Cover Letter Out
Before you engage the AI platform, write out what you want to say. Do your best to sound like yourself, accentuate the key points you think are important and show your personality. Be succinct and professional. Edit and refine the cover letter until you feel good about how it reads and looks.
3. Prompt the AI Platform
Here are some suggestions:
Describe Your Goal
Include the title and description of the job you’re applying to. You can attach a link to the job posting. If you need to explain a career pivot or career gap, explain to the AI tool the background of the situation. Always include the intended purpose of the cover letter when prompting.
Include who you’re targeting with the cover letter. If you know a hiring professional’s name, include a link to their LinkedIn page and job title. If you have any background or additional insight into the person, add it here.
Include an overview of the company you’re applying to. Describe their industry, company goals, mission and culture. Attach a link to their website, news articles, public financial disclosures or anything else you have access to that will help the AI platform respond in context.
Upload and attach a copy of your resume. This will help ensure the information aligns with your experience and highlights your key accomplishments.
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Describe the tone that’s important to you. This could be friendly, upbeat, serious, professional, etc. Are you comfortable with the platform using cliches, idioms or buzzwords? If not, restrict those. You can ask the AI platform to retain certain information that’s in your draft or instruct it to use creative license in how it revises your cover letter.
Direct the AI platform regarding any constraints. Is there a word count or page count limit? What formatting do you want the output in (Word, PDF)? Do you want bulleted lists or just paragraphs?
Ask how to improve the query. Finally, ask the platform if it has suggestions for how you could revise the prompt to return optimal results. Yes, it feels silly to ask it how it wants you to speak to it, but this step often reveals a detail or opportunity the user missed.
4. Refine. Refine. Refine.
When you get the first response back, keep going. The first iteration is rarely the ideal one. If what you see doesn’t feel like how you want to sound or what you want to highlight, keep working at it. It may take several tries before you get a great cover letter. The more you tell it what to change or edit, for example, “add back the highlights from my resume” or “retain my professional tone of voice,” the better the results.
5. Copy and Paste Before You Post
Some AI platforms embed subtle watermarks in their responses. While it’s appropriate to use AI to help you write, you don’t want to give the impression that it wrote it for you. As a last step, instruct the AI platform to remove watermarks and other obvious identifiers, then copy and paste the text into a program such as Word and clear formatting, just to be sure.
AI tools offer tremendous information and assistance today. Be sure you craft your message first, then use the AI platform like an assistant, helping you edit, refine and polish your cover letter. It’s vital that you never allow the platform to over inflate or misrepresent who you are or what you offer.
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