Professional cover letter

The business letter, unchanged: sender, date, recipient, subject, body, sign-off. Conservative fields expect it and notice when it is missing.

What this layout usually means

  • A sender block, then the date, then the recipient block
  • A subject or reference line naming the role and any posting number
  • Formal salutation and close
  • Single page, one column, no colour

What happens when a machine reads it

Not an opinion about design. These are the things a text extractor does with a page, and you can watch ours do them to your own file at the bottom of this page.

The reference line
Where a posting number exists and the form does not ask for it, this is the only place it fits. Leaving it out is how a letter ends up attached to the wrong requisition.
Length
The convention allows more room than anyone will read. Three paragraphs is not too short; a full page of formal prose usually is.

Reads cleanly

Right for law, finance, government and healthcare. Keep the structure and cut the length.

Write one instead

Our builder writes the structure above, exports as PDF, Word or plain text, and shows you what a parser reads back as you type. Free, no account, and the download is not the paywall.

Open the free builder

Or check the one you have

Drop it here and see the text a screening system gets — which sections it finds, which it loses, and what it decides you do for a living. Read in this tab; nothing is uploaded.

Your file is read by code running in this tab. It is never sent anywhere, and we never see it. Open your browser’s network tab and drop it again — you will see no upload.