How to Write a Killer Cover Letter A Publication of Edvisors and the Student Loan Network HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK About the Author Labeled a visionary in ﬁnancial aid with an intuitive sense for how marketing and community outreach should be done, Christopher S. Penn is the Chief Technology Ofﬁcer of the Student Loan Network and founder/producer of the multi-award winning Financial Aid Podcast Internet radio show. Mr. Penn has also personally researched and located over 600 scholarships totaling more than $9 billion in free educational funding. Mr. Penn has been called upon for expert information by researchers for the Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Aid and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as being sought after for conferences and private intensive seminars by state and national ﬁnancial aid agencies. He speaks daily on his Financial Aid Podcast Internet radio show on topics of personal ﬁnance, college affordability, and career/ professional development. Mr. Penn has also been featured in many books, newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the New York Times, magazines such as BusinessWeek and US News & World Report, television, and publications for his leadership in new media and ﬁnancial services. About the Student Loan Network The Student Loan Network, an Edvisors company, is one of the nation's fastest growing providers of student loans and related information. Since 1998, we have helped approximately 25 million students and parents access over $1 billion in federal and private student loans, scholarships and consolidation funding for undergraduate, graduate and continuing education. Our federal loan and private loan products are available both on the Internet and by phone in consultation with our Financial Aid Consultants. Learn more about the Student Loan Network at www.studentloannetwork.com or by calling toll-free 877-328-1565. As a leading online provider of education resources and ﬁnancial services, Edvisors provides a richer, more fulﬁlling education experience to students, educators and parents worldwide. We deliver on our mission by providing an unmatched portfolio of student loan products and education-related information and services. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Table of Contents Introduction 3 What is a Great Cover Letter? 4 Figure Out What's For Sale 6 AIDA: The Cover Letter That Tells Your Story 8 Capture Attention 8 Create Interest 9 Build Desire 9 Call to Action 11 Reﬁning Your Story 13 Getting There is Half the Fun 14 How to Package the Cover Letter 15 Fulﬁlling the Promise 16 Sample Cover Letter 17 Sample Cover Letter Components 18 Final Words 19 Additional Student Loan Network Resources 20 Acknowledgements and Credits 21 Copyright, Licensing, and Distribution 22 HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Introduction I just got this email from a job candidate looking to work for the Student Loan Network as a web developer: I may have the qualiﬁcations you seek. Portfolio and biography online (see signature link). Best, ABC ABC, whoever you are, you never had a chance. You were toast the moment I opened your email because your cover letter, instead of inspiring me to look further, immediately had me delete your email, qualiﬁcations unread. This poor cover letter has caused ABC to miss out on a very lucrative position at a phenomenal company, a position involving good pay, great place to work, easy access to public transit, 100% healthcare, 401k, and so much more - all lost because of a lousy cover letter. How can you avoid the same fate? The cover letter is probably the most neglected part of the job hunting process, and yet it can be the one item that can get you in the door of a future employer faster than anything else you do. The cover letter can also be the one item that sinks you as a candidate, denying you even a chance to prove yourself, such as ABC above. How do you write a cover letter that gets results? In this short guide, I'll share with you some ideas from the perspective of a hiring manager, plus a proven template you can use to make your existing cover letter far more effective. You don't have to be Shakespeare or Chaucer, either - just follow the structure in this guide and you'll be well on your way. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK What is a Great Cover Letter? A great cover letter is simply this: a ﬁrst impression. Scratch that, it's THE ﬁrst impression, the ﬁrst time a prospective future employer hears from you more often than not. What do you aim to do in virtually every ﬁrst impression, whether it's that person on the other side of the room sneaking peeks at you at a party, whether it's the ﬁrst time you meet a personal hero, or the ﬁrst time you apply for a job? You seek to get their attention. You seek to catch their interest. You seek to compel them into action. Think about every time you've been successful at making a ﬁrst impression in your life. What things did they all have in common? A great cover letter does the exact same things - it gets attention, makes the reader pay attention, catches their interest, and compels them to take action. What's the action, the desired goal of every cover letter? Get the reader to pick up the phone or compose an email, asking you to come in for an interview. Nothing else - not to prove that you're a great person, not to demonstrate how capable you are at every skill under the sun, not even to prove that you're a good employee. The goal of the cover letter is to get the interview. The resume - the document most of us spend time poring over - is more often than not just supporting data. If a hiring manager wants to talk to you based on a cover letter, the resume simply gives them factbased data to conﬁrm their decision. If a hiring manager wants to toss you out as a candidate, the resume is just a way of nitpicking all the qualiﬁcations you don't have exactly worded. Isn't it ironic that hundreds of career books spend the majority of their time talking about how to write your resume and not nearly enough time about how to write a cover letter to introduce the resume? HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Think of the cover letter this way. The resume is the engine of the car, the document that details a lot of your speciﬁc skills, the power stuff. The cover letter? That's the shiny exterior, the cherry red glossy ﬁnish that commands your eyes to LOOK RIGHT NOW AT ME. No one looks under the hood of a rustbucket - yet thousands of career experts make you focus on the engine and barely think about the exterior. Why? I suspect it's largely because most people don't know how to write a sales letter. That's what a cover letter is. It's a sales letter, and the product it sells is the unique combination of skills and abilities that you have that no one else has, and that's where the process of writing a truly great cover letter starts. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Figure Out What's For Sale If I had a nickel for every time a cover letter started, "I am interested in applying for the job of XYZ and I believe I am a good match for blah blah blah blah..." I don't care. As a hiring manager, I don't care what you think is great about you. I want to know one thing and one thing only: What's in it for me? Why should I hire you? Because ultimately as a hiring manager, I hire you to help me, to make my life easier, to solve my problems, to make me look better in the eyes of the people I work for. Me, me, me, me, my favorite person, me, as marketing expert Seth Godin says. If your cover letter does not answer what's in it for me in a compelling way, I won't grant you the interview. Now, most hiring managers will never be this blunt or direct. Most hiring managers will hide this honest truth behind layers of civility, but it is the absolute truth - I as a hiring manager do not hire you because it will beneﬁt you. I hire you because it will beneﬁt me. So how do you present what's in it for the hiring manager? You ﬁrst have to ﬁgure out what your personal brand is, what your superhero power is. What can you do better than anyone else? What tangible and intangible skills do you have that simply cannot be replicated, automated, or eliminated? Some people are musicians. They can create music, whereas the rest of us just download their creations. Even with training, we cannot easily achieve through skill building what is in their hearts and ears naturally. Some people are creative. They can make things, designs, words, and images just appear out of thin air, and their creations are exactly right. Some people are intensely reliable. Give them a job to do and you know with absolute certainty that it will be done exactly on time, exactly on budget, exactly to the speciﬁcations you've provided. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK There are inﬁnite skills in the universe, and in each person there is at least one, if not more, skill that they excel in. Sometimes you know what your skill is, from very early on. Other times, it takes some digging and brutal self honesty to ﬁnd it, but the key to both success and happiness is ﬁnding that skill and being able to express it. Once you ﬁgure out what's for sale, what your personal brand is, be able to express it in a single text message. If you can express your personal brand, what's for sale, in one short sentence, you're head and shoulders ahead of every other job hunter out there. Tip: Watch this presentation by Mitch Joel for exercises to develop an understanding of your personal brand. Now that we know what's for sale, let's move onto the structures themselves. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK AIDA: The Cover Letter That Tells Your Story It's said that in literature, there are just a few story archetypes - the quest, boy meets girl, underdog beats favored, etc. There are just a few basic sales letter structures as well, and we'll review a few in this section. Before we begin, it's important to note that structure and style are completely different things. Structure is the presentation of what you are going to write, whereas style is how you write. It's the difference between understanding that the wheels in a car should generally be on the bottom of the car versus how to drive a car, the difference between getting the right gift for someone versus how to wrap it, the difference between buying an engagement ring and knowing when to present it. Style is entirely you - your voice, how you write, the way you use language, and we're not going to spend much time with that, because altering your style creates inconsistency, which can harm you later in the job hunting process. If your cover letter reads like Shakespeare but you interview like Tony Soprano, the inconsistency, the lack of authenticity, may end up disqualifying you. Structure is how to present the information that is true about you, how to make it ﬂow logically, how to tell a story about you. For example, we know that plays typically occur in ﬁve acts, movies more often in three. We know that songs have a beginning, middle, and end, with a bridge sometimes in there. Even nursery rhymes and children's stories have structures - once upon a time and happily ever after. Our brain love structure and order because it helps us to understand what is otherwise a random pile of facts. Let's examine one of the oldest, most effective sales letter structures, the AIDA structure, and how it can apply to your cover letter. AIDA is probably the most well known of these structures and is a venerable tool in every salesperson's toolkit. Capture the reader's attention, build their interest, incite desire and an emotional response, then close the deal by compelling the reader to take action. The way to deploy this structure is simple, with a four section sales letter. Capture Attention HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK There are two ways to effectively capture attention - make a bold statement and ask a question. Imagine if the web developer who applied for a job with my company had started out their letter with statements like this: WARNING: Your proﬁts could double in the next 18 months! Do you know how many customers are being turned away from StudentLoanNetwork.com because of one simple ﬂaw you could change tomorrow? There are 12 ways to increase customer conversion on StudentLoanNetwork.com. Your site, excellent though it is, is only using 9 of them. Would you like me to help you with the other 3? If I received a cover letter like that, you bet I'd keep reading. Of course, you have to deliver on the promise in... Create Interest Once you've got the attention of the reader, you have to draw them in, fulﬁll at least a little bit the promises you've made in the opening attention getter. If we continue with the web developer example, of course there are a series of things that any web site can do to improve conversion. Pick one of the less frequently used ones and talk about it in a paragraph here. As an example, the developer could have said, "It's true. Of the 12 ways to increase customer conversion, having a mobile version of your site is absolutely essential, so that a customer can choose you whenever and wherever they are - and I can't ﬁnd a mobile version of StudentLoanNetwork.com, but I'd be happy to help you build one as part of the job of Web Developer!" Build Desire What sells the steak? The sizzle. What closes the deal? Emotion. The emotion that you work with in a cover letter depends on the kind of company or industry you're applying to and what matters most to the people who will read your letters. One of the HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK best ways to create emotion and desire is through the use of words like imagine, visualize, and dream. There are lots of ways to create emotion, but let's say for the sake of the web developer example that we're going to focus on reassurance, on making a safe hire. The developer could include a short bit about themselves, and then add what I think is the most important ingredient of all - testimonials. "By now you're probably wondering, who is this gal? My name is Jane Smith, and I want to join the Student Loan Network team as your Web Developer to help make SLN the very best it possibly can be online. I've had the opportunity to help others in the past make their web sites more impactful and more proﬁtable - but don't just take my word for it! Here's what others have said about my ability to help you: "I would have written that she's an absolutely terrible employee just to keep her a little longer here with us, because she's that good - our non-proﬁt site, Baseball for Babies, turned in record results thanks to her hard work." - Amanda Smith, B4B.org "I've never seen a web developer work as quickly to take an idea and turn it into a reality as Jane. She's incredible, and so easy to work with. Our site was up and running just days after hiring Jane." - Chuck Smith, CheeseIsTheOtherWhiteMeat.com Where do you get such testimonials that you can include on your cover letter? Simple - use a service such as LinkedIn to gather recommendations on previous work. What if you don't have a lot of previous work? Solicit recommendations from your peers and coworkers on projects, events, and other activities in which you had a participatory role. Tip: Watch this video of a LinkedIn seminar I presented recently to learn more about how to use LinkedIn effectively. Recommendations and testimonials are a terriﬁc way to reinforce the feeling of reassurance, that you're not only a great hire, but a safe choice as well. Testimonials are effectively short references, a way for prospective employers to have a sense of what others think about your work. Gather up as many testimonials about your work as you possibly can, and use them judiciously in a cover letter to reassurance, engage, and excite. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Call to Action Sales expert Zig Ziglar has a great expression about action: "Timid salesmen have skinny kids" - there are a lot of folks in sales who do a great job with the sales process up until they have to ask for the order, and then they get timid. They don't ask for the sale. An unbelievable number of cover letters do the exact same thing - they don't ask for the interview, or if they do, they do it in a passive-aggressive, timid way that doesn't encourage the reader to want to take action right away. Here are just a few "closers" I've received in my inbox this week: "I look forward to talking with you regarding my skills in these ﬁelds that will be useful to you." "If interested in speaking further, do let me know." "Thank you, I look forward to hearing back from you." "Attached is my resume for you to see my current and past experience. Please feel free to contact me either by e-mail or calling me at (555) 555-1212 if you would be interested in setting up an interview." None of these closing paragraphs - "closers", if you will - inspires the reader to take action, to do something. There's no perception of a valuable opportunity about to slip through the reader's ﬁngers unless they act now. Here's a secret of human nature - we perceive value based on how others perceive value. Call it keeping up with the Joneses or envy or whatever term works best for you, but we set our own values based on what others think, for good or ill. In the world of dating, it's common to ﬁnd a person already in a relationship has more appeal than someone single. Advertisers rely on the perception of popularity to boost products all the time, and that's what we want to do at the end of the cover letter. We want to create a dual sensation of popularity (and thus value) and scarcity. Here's an example: "I know we're both busy, coordinating schedules and trying to get as much done as possible, aren't we? I'd love to come talk with you more about some of the other 12 ideas for improving the Student Loan Network's web sites, but the calendar's getting pretty crazy. I'm available on Tuesday, May 20 at 3:15 PM and Friday, May 23 at 10:15 AM - which time works better for you? Of course, if those dates don't work, I'm happy to move some things around just for you. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Sign the letter with your name, phone number, email address, and personal web site, and get ready to send it. In the back of this book, you'll ﬁnd this complete sales letter as a template. You'll notice several additional things - even in plain text, it works very well, but with formatting, it's even more powerful. Don’t be afraid to have a couple versions of your cover letter, formatted and unformatted, so that you can deliver the version that will have maximum impact. Marketing expert Seth Godin tells a funny story about predicting who will be successful at speed dating. Speed dating, if you're not familiar with it, is a social event in which courters and courtees gather in a room, the courtees take seats at stations in the room, and the courters rotate through the room, taking six minutes to speak with each of the courtees. One of the benchmarks of a successful speed dating courter is how long it takes for the courter to say the word "you" in their introduction. A courter whose opening "speech" is all "me, me, me" rarely gets the opportunity to continue any of their conversations outside the speed dating event. Our cover letter focuses on the exact same principle - it's all about you, you, you the hiring manager, the problems you have, and the ways in which hiring me will solve your problems for you. It's about making you feel safe in hiring me and about you being excited to make that decision right now. No matter what language or speaking style you use in your cover letter, you must always be repeatedly selling "what's in it for me" to the hiring manager. The AIDA structure provides a convenient, easy to understand way to do that, tell your story, and close the deal. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Reﬁning Your Story You’ve got a great cover letter, right? Perhaps. One of the dangers we have to be aware of when we write is the danger of seeing our material too much. Simple grammar and spelling errors can go unnoticed after we’ve stared at a page too long. How do we remedy this? Here’s a three step process to reﬁne your cover letter. Step 1: Read it out loud. Print out your cover letter, grab a red pen, and read it out loud. Mark up any point which verbally causes you to stutter, stumble, or pause due to confusion and language (as opposed to dramatic effect). Go back and edit your cover letter until you can read it clearly and it takes on a conversational tone. Step 2: Record it out loud. Read your cover letter into an audio recorder of some kind, then listen to it. Pay careful attention as you listen for parts which make your mind wander. These are parts in which the language of the cover letter isn’t compelling enough to keep your attention. Step 3: Borrow a mouth. Ask a friend, coworker, colleague, or relative to take a read of your cover letter. However, don’t have them just read it - ask them to read it out loud, and see if there are additional stumbling points for them. Make notes and see if there are opportunities to reword or rephrase so that they can read it aloud more easily. Once your cover letter is easy to read aloud and compelling to listen to, you’re ready to deliver it to prospective employers! HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Getting There is Half the Fun We've got a great cover letter written now, along with a resume, and we're ready to get you a job, right? Not so fast. The cover letter, great though it is, has to be READ by someone. Who? That's even more important. You want your cover letter to be read by the person who has the authority to hire you. More often than not, that's not someone in Human Resources, and that's the catch. Human Resources is often responsible for posting jobs on the job boards like Monster.com and Craigslist, but the hiring manager is rarely included in the listing. Instead you get a generic address like jobs@edvisors.com. (if you're awesome, send us your resume) Let's assume for a moment that you know exactly which company or companies you want to work for. Your next step is to ﬁnd out who would be the appropriate person to talk to inside the company about the job. If the job listing has the hiring manager's name, terriﬁc. If not, visit the company's web site and start exploring the About pages to see who works there. More often than not, you'll ﬁnd someone in the company who is an obvious candidate to receive your resume. Here's another secret: most corporations have a standard syntax, a standard pattern for corporate email addresses. First initial, last name, or ﬁrst name dot last name - there are a dozen different variants. Google the company's domain name like this: email crayonville.com http://www.google.com/search?q=email +crayonville.com and you'll see some of the sample email addresses of employees who work at that company. Once you know what the syntax of the email address is, you can email your cover letter and resume to the hiring manager you've located by surﬁng the company's web site. It's generally a good idea to also send a copy of your application package to the Human Resources department, too. Doing so makes sure your resume ﬁnds its way into the HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK "process" internally at the company, so that if the hiring manager is persuaded, Human Resources will have a record of your job application and will be less likely to obstruct your potential interview. How to Package the Cover Letter Here’s a peek at a recent application for the Web Developer position that arrived in my inbox: What’s wrong with this picture? There’s no cover letter. There’s an attachment that says cover letter, but honestly, I’m not going to open it and read it. I don’t have the time as a busy professional, and opening that attachment is probably going to cause my computer to hang for a while as Microsoft Word gets its act together and gets going. Take a look at this even worse example: What was the fate of these two candidates? Trash can. Not even considered for the job. Remember, the cover letter is a ﬁrst impression. Instead of sending it as an attachment, put your cover letter in the text of your email. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Fulﬁlling the Promise You've made a cover letter that creates a promise, a promise of a great employee just waiting to be hired. Your resume backs up your cover letter with all the objective data and pieces that a hiring manager will need to justify hiring you. The ﬁnal piece of the puzzle, once you get an interview, is to fulﬁll the promise you've made. This is why it's so important for your cover letter to be 100% accurate, 100% truthful. The job interview is an opportunity to reinforce the messages in your cover letter, to reinforce how terriﬁc you are, but in your interview you must be in sync with your cover letter. Never, ever lie in your cover letter or resume. Tell the truth - obviously, we've talked a lot in this guide about how to present the truth in the most favorable light possible, but it's still all about the truth, about the real you. Two reasons for this - ﬁrst, if you lie on a cover letter or resume, or even exaggerate beyond what's reasonable, your interview will likely trip you up, especially on anything factual, like previous jobs and experience. The signiﬁcant short term cost of lying on a cover letter is the incongruity of a great letter and a candidate that doesn't fulﬁll the promise of the letter. Second, if you lie and get the job anyway, chances are you won't be as happy in the job. The company that hired you in reality hired someone else, a ﬁctional version of you that is more capable, more knowledgeable, and more talented than you actually are, so expectations will be higher, and failing to live up to those could make for miserable working conditions and a short tenure, neither of which are desirable outcomes. Tell the truth. Present well, present effectively, showcase what accomplishments you've already achieved, and when you do get hired, you'll be able to fulﬁll the promise you've made in your cover letter, the promise of being a terriﬁc employee at a great company. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Sample Cover Letter Dear Christopher Penn, There are 12 ways to increase customer conversion on StudentLoanNetwork.com. Your site, excellent though it is, is only using 9 of them. Would you like me to help you with the other 3? It's true. Of the 12 ways to increase customer conversion, having a mobile version of your site is absolutely essential, so that a customer can choose you whenever and wherever they are - and I can't ﬁnd a mobile version of StudentLoanNetwork.com, but I'd be happy to help you build one as part of the job of Web Developer! By now you're probably wondering, who is this gal? My name is Jane Smith, and I want to join the Student Loan Network team as your Web Developer to help make SLN the very best it possibly can be online. I've had the opportunity to help others in the past make their web sites more impactful and more proﬁtable - but don't just take my word for it! Here's what others have said about my ability to help you: "I would have written that she's an absolutely terrible employee just to keep her a little longer here with us, because she's that good - our non-proﬁt site, Baseball for Babies, turned in record results thanks to her hard work." - Amanda Smith, B4B.org "I've never seen a web developer work as quickly to take an idea and turn it into a reality as Jane. She's incredible, and so easy to work with. Our site was up and running just days after hiring Jane." - Chuck Smith, CheeseIsTheOtherWhiteMeat.com I know we're both busy, coordinating schedules and trying to get as much done as possible, aren't we? I'd love to come talk with you more about some of the other 12 ideas for improving the Student Loan Network's web sites, but the calendar's getting pretty crazy. I'm available on Tuesday, May 20 at 3:15 PM and Friday, May 23 at 10:15 AM - which time works better for you? Of course, if those dates don't work, I'm happy to move some things around just for you. Sincerely, Jane Smith (555) 555-1212 janesmith@gmail.com http://www.hirejanesmith.com HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Sample Cover Letter Components Color coded: ATTENTION INTEREST DESIRE ACTION There are 12 ways to increase customer conversion on StudentLoanNetwork.com. Your site, excellent though it is, is only using 9 of them. Would you like me to help you with the other 3? It's true. Of the 12 ways to increase customer conversion, having a mobile version of your site is absolutely essential, so that a customer can choose you whenever and wherever they are - and I can't ﬁnd a mobile version of StudentLoanNetwork.com, but I'd be happy to help you build one as part of the job of Web Developer! By now you're probably wondering, who is this gal? My name is Jane Smith, and I want to join the Student Loan Network team as your Web Developer to help make SLN the very best it possibly can be online. I've had the opportunity to help others in the past make their web sites more impactful and more proﬁtable - but don't just take my word for it! Here's what others have said about my ability to help you: "I would have written that she's an absolutely terrible employee just to keep her a little longer here with us, because she's that good - our non-proﬁt site, Baseball for Babies, turned in record results thanks to her hard work." - Amanda Smith, B4B.org "I've never seen a web developer work as quickly to take an idea and turn it into a reality as Jane. She's incredible, and so easy to work with. Our site was up and running just days after hiring Jane." - Chuck Smith, CheeseIsTheOtherWhiteMeat.com I know we're both busy, coordinating schedules and trying to get as much done as possible, aren't we? I'd love to come talk with you more about some of the other 12 ideas for improving the Student Loan Network's web sites, but the calendar's getting pretty crazy. I'm available on Tuesday, May 20 at 3:15 PM and Friday, May 23 at 10:15 AM - which time works better for you? Of course, if those dates don't work, I'm happy to move some things around just for you. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Final Words We've covered a lot of ground in this book, but you've now got the template for writing a great cover letter and some real tools for ﬁnding the appropriate recipients. I'd love to know how well this system works for you, and how I can make it work even better. Please stay in touch and send me a copy of your new, improved cover letter after trying out this system! Best regards, Christopher S. Penn CTO, the Student Loan Network Producer, the Financial Aid Podcast http://www.StudentLoanNetwork.com http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com ﬁnancialaidpodcast@gmail.com HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Additional Student Loan Network Resources We’re often asked about resources for ﬁnding additional information about paying for college, and as a leading provider of education ﬁnancial services, we’re proud to offer: www.FAFSAonline.com Free tips and tutorials for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. www.StudentScholarshipSearch.com Free scholarship directory containing hundreds of scholarships worth over $9.5 billion www.ScholarshipPoints.com Free quarterly scholarship drawings for survey and contest participation www.StaffordLoan.com Get information about Stafford federal student loans and apply online www.GradLoans.com Resource directory for graduate students, including scholarships, federal and private student loans, and consolidation www.ParentPLUSLoan.com Get information and solutions for parents of undergraduate students. www.AlternativeStudentLoan.com Find information about private student loans and when to apply for them in the ﬁnancial aid process. www.StudentLoanConsolidator.com Learn how to make your student loans more manageable after graduation. www.FinancialAidNews.com Monthly free newsletter covering how-to and tips for ﬁnancial aid. www.FinancialAidPodcast.com Daily free ﬁnancial aid Internet radio show featuring a new scholarship every day, plus news, job hunting tips, and more. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Acknowledgements and Credits I would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance in reviewing this book in its many drafts and for their suggestions, many of which made radical improvements to the book. • • • • • Dr. Jennifer Selke, UC Berkeley Eric Sohn, Accuity Dave Fleet, Government of Ontario Susan Murphy, Jester Creative The staff of the Student Loan Network Colophon This eBook was published in Apple Inc.’s Pages, using Palatino as the body text and Myriad Pro for headings. How To Write a Killer Cover Letter was optimized using Adobe Acrobat and is hosted and published by the Student Loan Network and www.GraduateCenter.com. HOW TO WRITE A KILLER COVER LETTER, A PUBLICATION OF THE STUDENT LOAN NETWORK Copyright, Licensing, and Distribution First Edition, Copyright 1998 - 2008, Christopher Penn and the Student Loan Network. All rights reserved. Reprinting, redistributing, or copying any portion of this guide or the guide in its entirety is prohibited under US and International Copyright Law except under the terms speciﬁed below. This guide is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Under the terms of this license, you may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions: • Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner speciﬁed by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). • Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes1. • No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to www.GraduateCenter.com. 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