HR 101: Covering the cover letter, its history, and its future

A precisely worded job description is the first step in attracting top-tier applicants, but there is one particular phrase that can make a candidate say, “no, thanks” before they even scroll to the salary: Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

Why are cover letters still a thing in 2023? The first job posting to request a cover letter ran in a 1956 edition of the New York Times, according to The Atlantic. It was for an industrial paint chemist with Dutch Boy Paints and required applicants to mail in their résumé.

A decade later, the cover letter had become so mainstream that services offered to help job-seekers craft perfect cover letters, according to The Atlantic.

Mailing in or dropping off résumés would be the way of the world until the birth of the fax machine and then the online application. But the application itself hasn’t changed for decades.

“Back in the day, technology wasn’t as advanced as it is today…so how did you have a conversation and get to know a person,” Jen Wu, VP of people for digital marketing agency Team Lewis, told HR Brew. “So, the cover letter, if you think about it, was almost like this executive summary…of someone’s work experience, but also their ability to do research and [discover] are they actually applying just for the sake of applying.”

Fast-forward. Almost one-half (44%) of LinkedIn users surveyed by Chris Morrison, founder of executive search and board advisory firm Meritos, believe “the cover letter is dead,” but almost as many (43%) said the cover letter is “alive and well.” So, which is it?

While the cover letter may have been an important tool in job hunting and hiring in the past, Wu believes it’s not necessary today.

“If you think about where we are from a technology standpoint, we have social platforms and you can get a deep dive into people based on their digital footprint,” she said. “The cover letter has now become a bit more of a repetitive reuse of data that we’re already collecting on a real-time basis. [Think about] the speed in which we move now. You want to capture things in real time and something like the cover letter, just feels very static.”