While a number of legal vacancies still require a covering letter in some form, it can harm a candidate’s chances if the letter submitted is too long, includes too much information from the CV or doesn’t focus enough on the firm. One recruiter offered some general words of advice on what to include: “Don’t include anything that could be considered vitally important – instead, make sure it’s in the CV. Keep it to one paragraph explaining why you are good for the job and why you want the job,” said Shan Singh, consultant, legal and compliance, with CML in Hong Kong.

Singh also advised that anyone writing to a firm or company ‘on spec’ as a way of introducing themselves would need to apply the same principles to their introductory e-mail. The basic rules set out below will help ensure a covering letter does its job.

Be aware of the hiring motives of each audience:
The decision maker, recruitment agent and the person screening resumes will all have different motives when reading covering letters. A HR representative who screens resumes is only interested in whether the skills and experience listed match the job description. There can be over 100 CVs with covering letters passing a HR professional’s desk each day, according to Singh, so any key words in the covering letter need to stand out in bold or bullet points to be noticed.

Lose the ‘I’:
Too many sentences beginning with the word ‘I’ and too much self-promotion can be viewed by firms and companies as a lack of interest in them and the job. One useful idea is to change at least some of those ‘I’ and ‘my’ sentences into ones containing the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ to place the emphasis back onto the firm.

Don’t repeat entries from a CV:
However interesting a candidate is, no one likes to read the same thing twice. A covering letter really only highlights what a candidate has to offer and what they know about the firm they are applying for – it should not recite large sections of the CV at length.