Do you still need a cover letter?

Ask ten recruiters and you will hear both answers delivered with total confidence. The disagreement is not really about cover letters. It is about workflow. An in-house recruiter screening several hundred applications for a volume role reads CVs first and opens a letter only if something needs explaining. A hiring manager at a twenty-person company, choosing between eight candidates for a role that will shape their team, often reads everything you send.

So the useful question is not whether cover letters are dead. It is whether the particular person reading this particular application is likely to read it, and whether it would change their mind if they did. Once you frame it that way, most applications fall clearly on one side of the line, and the ones in the middle become easy to judge.

There is also a difference between reading a letter and weighing it. Some reviewers open every letter, but only to check for red flags: a letter addressed to the wrong company, a mismatched job title, obvious errors. For them the letter is a filter, not a persuader. That still matters, because a careless letter can sink an application that the CV alone would have carried.

A letter earns its time when your CV leaves a question that a reader would otherwise answer for you, usually unfavourably. These are the situations where it most often makes the difference:

In each of the cases above, the letter is not decoration. It is the only part of the application where you can explain something in full sentences before the reader fills the silence with their own assumptions. The opposite cases are just as clear.

One-click applications on large job boards, high-volume graduate or retail hiring with structured screening questions, and roles handled by agency recruiters all sit at the low-value end. The agency case is worth understanding. The recruiter often writes their own summary of you for the client, and your letter may never travel with the CV at all. What helps an agency recruiter is a short note covering motivation, notice period and anything they need to sell you, not a formal letter.

Even at this end, a letter rarely hurts unless it is poor. The real cost is your time. If you are sending many applications into systems where letters are optional and seldom opened, that time is usually better spent tailoring the CV, because the CV is the document that gets read first everywhere.

When an application form marks the cover letter as optional, it means the system will accept the application without one. It tells you nothing about how the reader will feel when the field is empty. For a competitive role at an organisation that clearly cares about motivation and fit, an empty field can look like lower effort than the candidates who wrote something. For a volume role, nobody will notice.

A reasonable rule: if the role is one you genuinely want, and the organisation is small enough that a human will look at the whole application, fill the optional field. If you are applying broadly into large systems, leave it and put the effort into the CV.

Local habits matter as well. Many UK public sector roles ask for a supporting or personal statement instead of a traditional letter, and Australian government roles often ask for responses to selection criteria. These are not optional extras. They are frequently the main assessed document, and a strong CV cannot rescue a weak or missing statement.

A CV is a record. It is built from facts, dates and evidence, and by convention it contains very little argument. It cannot comfortably say why you want this role, why now, or why a move that looks sideways on paper is a deliberate step. It cannot tell the story that connects three jobs in different sectors into one direction.

A cover letter can. Its job is to make the argument the CV cannot make: here is what you need, here is the evidence I have it, and here is why this role at this organisation is the logical next move for me. When a letter repeats the CV in paragraph form, it fails because it adds nothing new. When it answers the questions the CV raises, it often becomes the most persuasive page in the application.

Think about what the reader is wondering after reading the CV. A retail manager applying for a logistics coordinator role leaves them asking whether this is a real move or a scattergun application. A candidate in Colombo applying to a Melbourne firm leaves them asking about timing and work rights. A strong letter names those questions before the reader has to, and answers each in a sentence or two. That is often enough to move an application from "interesting but risky" to "worth a call".

Most letters are too long and too general. Three to four short paragraphs, comfortably under one page, is enough for almost every role. A structure that works:

Address it to a named person if you can find one; "Dear Hiring Manager" is acceptable when you cannot. Match the tone to the organisation, slightly more formal for a bank or government body, a little warmer for a start-up, but never casual. Send it in the format requested, whether that is a separate PDF, the body of an email or a form field that strips formatting, in which case keep it plain.

The test for every sentence in a letter is whether it could appear in anyone else's. "I am a hard-working team player with strong communication skills" could. "I rebuilt the month-end close so the team stopped working weekends, and your posting describes the same pressure" could not. Specific letters get read to the end; generic ones get skimmed and forgotten.

Before you start writing, ask three questions. Is a letter requested or strongly implied? Does my CV leave a question that a reader will answer badly without context? Is a person likely to read the whole application? If the answer to any of these is yes, write one. If all three are no, you can skip it with little risk.

To keep the effort proportionate, maintain one strong base letter and rewrite only the evidence and motivation paragraphs for each role. That way, when a letter does matter, the one you send is already good, and you are not starting from a blank page at eleven at night before a closing date.