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My cover letters are beautiful. I'm fairly sure no human has ever read one.

Anonymous23 Jul 2026

I tailor every single one, a specific detail about the company, why me, the whole ritual. An hour a pop. And I have exactly zero evidence any of it reaches a person before the ATS files it under who-cares. I'm tempted to run an experiment: send half with a real letter and half with two throwaway lines, then see what moves. Has anyone tried that and noticed any difference at all?

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Anonymous23 Jul 2026
The who-cares folder is very real. I stopped writing them at all for anything with a big careers portal and my callback rate didn't budge a millimeter.
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Anonymous23 Jul 2026
I ran basically this experiment last year. For big companies with an ATS, no measurable difference. For small startups where a founder reads the applications, the tailored one clearly helped. So now I triage: throwaway for the giants, real effort for the small ones.
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