Cover letters and resumes are a thing of the past?
Many young people, when applying for a job, are chagrined to hear that they have to supply a cover letter and a resume - after entering the same data into a company website and attaching it all to an e-mail. Why do we have these antiquated requirements and why are they so hard to deal with?
A patron recently donated some equipment to the Parcheesi club and we needed to send a thank-you letter acknowledging the gift, not only as a courtesy, and not only to encourage future donations, but to provide written evidence to the donor should they try to deduct the cost of the gift.
It took us four days to write and send the letter.
Back in the day, my office would send out dozens of letters a day, as well as thick FedEx (and later, Priority Mail) envelopes with 50-100 page documents and accompanying photocopies of supporting documents. The world ran on paper, not just a few years ago, and not surprisingly, we had systems in place to generate reams of paper documents.
Before the advent of computers, it was row after row of secretaries, banging away on IBM Selectrics and in years before that, Royal manual typewriters. In an era before wite-out, your error rate had to be very low. Every executive had their own secretary, to prepare and file documents and even set up phone calls. They were human computers in an era before computers.
With word processing, it got even easier to generate volumes of letters - and fewer people were needed. I had templates set up in WordPerfect for DOS, for routine reporting letters and with a simple keystroke or two, a "macro" would enter the client name and address, salutation, and "re: line" for the matter at hand. A cover letter could take as little as 15 seconds to prepare.
Cover letters and Resumes were de rigeur back then, even after e-mail became a thing. A properly drafted cover letter and resume was a chance to show you knew how to draft proper business correspondence, as well as demonstrate your attention to detail. Woe be to the applicant who had typos in his resume or cover letter!
But letter writing was historically what drove the business world back then. "In response to your letter of the 6th, I bring to your attention..." and so on an so forth. Particularly in the era when phone calls were expensive, the business letter ruled. It put your words right on someone's desk and they had to deal with it.
Even personal communications - particularly personal communications - relied upon the mail. I recounted before how we found a collection of "antique" post cards from Mark's Grandmother. One of them was just a blank card with the inscription, "Coming up on the train tomorrow, meet you at the station at 3:00!" They were confident that if the post card went out in the morning's mail, it would arrive the same day or the next morning at the latest. When a communications channel is essential, it is made to work well.
Today? Well, I am waiting for a medication that was mailed on December 20th and is shown as "in transit" for the last four days. No one cares anymore as most of the mail is just junk anyway - advertising circulars and such. We SPAMmed the USPS and like an old Usenet newsgroup, it has devolved into ads for come-ons and scams.
But even phone calls and voicemails today are never returned and e-mails are deleted ("must have gone to my Spam folder! Whoops!") without a thought. Communication has broken down. And yes, even letters are ignored and often not acknowledged.
Today, well, letters are seen as an anachronism. We just don't send them anymore. Even e-mails are seen as old-school, with major corporations communicating via text with their customers and partners.
So, in a way, it is not surprising that sending a letter is now as difficult as it is. Microsoft WORD was the first step in the degradation of letter writing ability. A program designed to format books is a poor choice for the one-page business letter. Hewlett-Packard made printing itself a toxic nightmare of high costs and proprietary "cartridges." A full-time secretary from 1960 and an IBM Selectric would be cheaper to use than an HP printer these days - even accounting for inflation!
To prepare this one-page letter, we had to get the letter template - which was riddled with embedded codes and orphaned tabs (using tabs to format a document is just wrong! Set your margins!). Left-justified? Please, no! And for God's sake, pick one font and stick with it. At least they didn't use Comic Sans. Oh, and if you are going to use pre-printed letterhead, format your documents so they don't print on the letterhead. And yes, instead of ten carriage-returns, you should just set the top margin for page 1. But this is lost on people today - formatting printed documents is a lost art. Use that white space, people!
Anyway, once I fixed the letter, got the right address and so forth, obtained letterhead and envelopes, I was able to print the letter - after doing a test run so I could remember which side went "up" in the printer. Got any stamps? I bought a roll - a lifetime's supply at this point.
It was frustrating for me as I used to crank out form letters like this in minutes. But today, well, we just don't write letters anymore so our systems are old and rusty or non-existent. At one time, every town had at least one blacksmith and a stable for horses. At one time, every town had a number of gas stations with a "mechanic on duty" sign out front. Times change and things become obsolete - and harder to do.
The cover letter and resume seem antiquated - an antique as the suit-and-tie, which many employers expect applicants to wear, even today, for blue collar job interviews. That being said, these anachronistic artifacts are a chance for a job applicant to stand out from the crowd, provided they are read at all. Many companies are now using AI-enabled programs to screen applicant data, rejecting anyone (and everyone) who fails to mention a number of keywords. It is kind of sad - and self-defeating for corporations. I never would have been hired for any job in today's market.
There is a lot of noise going on over H-1B visa workers in the tech industry. They often have the right credentials and proper keywords in their resume, along with the requisite degrees from acclaimed universities. Well, that and they basically can't quit without being deported. So it is like slave labor, really.
But think about it for a minute. In today's job market where every employer wants ten years of experience and a masters degree for an entry-level coding job, would today's tech mavens be Billionaires or pizza delivery drivers? Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Dell, Ellison, and a host of others, all dropped out of college. None would be hired today by the AI hiring algorithms, even with a good cover letter.
Back in the day, the cover letter was a chance to explain yourself to a human being. Today, it is a pointless formality. Letter writing died not only because no one writes letters anymore, but because no one reads them, either,
