Dear Hiring Manager: Is The Cover Letter Dead?

This transcript has been generated by AI and may contain slight discrepancies from the audio or video recording.

Anne: Hey, it's your favorite co-worker, Anne, and this is the All Things Work podcast. Has anyone ever actually wanted to write a cover letter? Has any recruiter ever gotten excited to open one?

For decades, the cover letter was the price of admission for any job application. It was supposed to shed light on how a candidate communicates, why they wanted the role, and maybe fill in a gap or two on that resume. For hiring managers, it was one more piece of information to weigh alongside everything else in front of them.

But here's the problem. generative AI (GenAI) can now help candidates produce a polished and personalized cover letter in seconds. So if a tool can replicate the asset HR used to screen for, were we ever really screening for the right thing?

A Business Insider poll on LinkedIn found 74% of people found the cover letter no longer useful in the recruitment process. So that's what we're digging into today — what the declining art of the cover letter reveals about the future of hiring itself. We have a wonderful guest who has made it their mission to improve the hiring process. I'll introduce them right after this.

Anne: Kat Kibben is the founder of Three Ears Media, where they specialize in inclusive job postings and recruiting content that reduces bias at the very top of the hiring funnel. Kat's an author, a corporate recruiting trainer, and a keynote speaker who spent years in the trenches of recruiting, teaching teams how to write better job postings, working with HR tech companies, and doing recruitment marketing firsthand.

Essentially, Kat has seen all of the different pain points of the hiring process and application process altogether. So Kat, welcome to All Things Work.

Kat Kibben: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Anne: I'm so happy you're here, and I'm really excited to dig in. So let's start with the big question. Is the cover letter actually dead, or does it still have a purpose?

Kat Kibben: Reminder — you're talking to a technical copywriter, so I will always have love for the writing format, and I do believe that cover letters have a purpose, but really for roles where writing is a primary element of the deliverables. It's part of something that people are working on every day, and I'm not talking about writing emails. I mean writing blogs, writing podcast overviews, and writing that high-level material that directly correlates back into the job.

I think the reason we're talking about the cover letter dying is because we're starting to realize that it does not have universal purpose, and we probably shouldn't be using it on every job.

Anne: That's such a good perspective. It's not always a one-size-fits-all in the application and hiring process. So maybe it's not necessarily a dead or lost art, but maybe not for everything when it comes to the hiring application process.

We mentioned a poll through Business Insider in our introduction that we saw on LinkedIn. We also saw an article where Business Insider spoke with one of the experts from consulting giant McKinsey, who said that they actually got rid of the cover letter over three years ago — which is a pretty big move for such a large company. Are you seeing similar trends with your clients as well?

Kat Kibben: Yes. I think that people who do high-volume recruiting — which is definitely McKinsey and companies of that size — have realized that it's just another stumbling block of the candidate experience where people struggle to show up well, and ultimately we see hiring managers dismissing this information because there's always that revolving door. They're always reading resumes. They're always interviewing people. When you're doing that scale of hiring, it's hard to really slow down and consider every part of every person's application.

But on a smaller basis, I actually think the cover letter is starting to make a bit of a comeback because of the volume they're experiencing. The volume at a high-volume company makes them remove steps, but the volume at a low-volume company — meaning a company that does not do a ton of hiring — is different. What we see with them is that they want the cover letter because they have all of these assets and it's really hard to distinguish good, better, and best.

Anne: Great points. Let's bring AI into the conversation. generative AI (GenAI) can help write a cover letter that sounds thoughtful, personal, even passionate within seconds. It's something a lot of us are starting to rely on, because when you're applying to so many jobs, it just makes the process more efficient and easier most of the time.

So if a cover letter can no longer tell a hiring manager the most reliable information about a candidate — how that candidate thinks or communicates — what is that document really telling us, and can we really trust it anymore?

Kat Kibben: I would actually challenge that and say that using AI to send in a generic cover letter says a lot about how you think, especially as someone who's a writer. Where I see the struggle is that most people don't actually know what "good" means. They think it's a good cover letter because it sounds good, but it lacks the specificity and details that a human might insert into a conversation because of their unique lived experience.

If you are going to write a cover letter, I think the framing needs to shift. This is not a summary of your resume. This is a unique opportunity to distinguish your individual experience from every other person who has 10-plus years of experience and all of the other checkboxes already established.

With AI, hiring teams don't even need to look at all of the resumes — they can use AI to screen and figure out who meets all of the minimum mandatory requirements. That creates an even playing field. If you all meet the same requirements, now what? How do you stand out? Copying and pasting something from a large language model is not the answer.

Anne: That's why SHRM always says AI plus Human Ingenuity (HI) — AI plus human intelligence. You never want to just copy and paste, because it shows a lack of passion and integrity in following through and ensuring quality. AI can certainly be helpful, but it shouldn't replace the human element.

So let's dive a little deeper. If AI can replicate the things we once looked for in a cover letter — polish, personalization, and enthusiasm — what might that tell us about whether we were evaluating the right things in the first place on the hiring side?

Kat Kibben: I think this is our big light bulb moment, and it's one of the biggest benefits of AI right now. It's allowing us to get that 10,000-foot view that we simply did not have before, because we didn't have the imagination for it. We didn't have tools that could do a lot of this work without a lot of complications and a lot of money.

Now we've taken a step back to ask, "Is this doing what I thought it was doing, or have I copied and pasted a 100-year-old hiring system and expected it to work in the future of work?" I think that's the moment we're approaching — where we're realizing which steps we actually need. It's taken a lot of growth from talent acquisition, and I would expect that in the next five to 10 years, there's an enormous opportunity to build a system we know works for our unique businesses, instead of copying and pasting old systems up to and including that cover letter.

Anne: Exactly — it's not a one-size-fits-all. Every organization has different needs. Are you seeing your clients start to recognize how they need to personalize their approach to their organizational needs and the talent they're looking for? Is that a challenge you're seeing them face?

Kat Kibben: It's a big challenge, because it's not just a matter of believing there's a better way to do things. There's also significant organizational change and transformation work that needs to happen. When we talk about hiring, it's not some little silo that recruiting and HR own in a corner. It is owned by the entire business, and that means every single person inside of that business has influence over how it's executed — and will have something to say.

In my last 10 years of running my business, one of the surprising things I ran into over and over again is that hiring managers resist change when it comes to hiring. I think it's because, across the board, we have not done a great job of educating them about why we do things. There's also a lack of empathy around the fact that hiring managers have all been taught different ways to approach hiring, and we don't do a lot of level-setting to make sure they understand what good hiring looks like in our unique culture and organization — not just, "You're a manager, so you're good at hiring."

Anne: You've spent a lot of your career trying to reduce bias at the top of the hiring funnel — job postings, screenings, those first impressions. Are you seeing in your work whether AI has made that bias worse, better, or just different? What are you seeing from your angle?

Kat Kibben: As a job posting writing expert and someone who's really dedicated themselves to the candidate experience and understanding its intricacies, we know that historically the system has not produced an equitable decision. What I mean by that is we don't know that we hired the best person every time — we know that we hired someone.

AI is a building block tool, meaning every decision it recommends and every suggestion it makes is based on a data set. Unfortunately, the very large data set when it comes to hiring includes things like job postings and biased decisions, and job postings have been notoriously bad for years — that's why I've spent the last 10 years working on them. There are still thousands of bad ones. All of these AI-generated job postings are copying and pasting the same biased tactics: things like years of experience that have been completely exaggerated, because years quantify time but don't qualify people. Degree requirements that don't align to the role. A series of other systematic issues that we know don't work — and AI can't fix that part because it was trained on bad data.

Anne: Right. Anyone who's been a job seeker — especially those long-term unemployed job seekers who are very prevalent in the labor market right now — is seeing just so many different types of job postings that either require cover letters or don't. It's not like an automated process where you can say, "I've already got this ready; I'll just submit it here and adjust it based on this posting." Every job posting feels so different, and I feel like that's partially a good thing, because it shows companies are at least beginning to see what they need to do differently.

Kat Kibben: To an extent. I feel like the gap is that hiring managers and recruiters think we're very clear when we write a job posting on what we want — and there's proof that we aren't that clear, because we get a lot of unqualified applicants. If you can't verbalize exactly what you want and have the person clearly say yes or no to it, there's going to be something lost in translation, and no machine can fix that. Clarity is the responsibility of the communicator.

Anne: "Clarity is the responsibility of the communicator." Let's repeat that to ourselves day in and day out. That's so important.

Kat Kibben: And when it comes to the job posting, we need that clarity because the job posting is the base infrastructure of your entire AI opportunity. How are you going to automate an interview process if you never define what you're looking for? How are you going to handle compensation accurately if you don't define the skills? How do you build performance, structure, and growth over time using any kind of automation if you don't define the finish line?

This problem is as much a candidate problem as it is an employee experience issue. These companies are running toward that cliff, and I believe there's going to be a vast transformation in job postings as they see low-quality results from their AI and realize that their core data is the issue.

Anne: Fabulous points. We've talked about the art of the cover letter, and we've also discussed on SHRM's All Things Work podcast and newsletter different approaches when it comes to degrees, skills-first hiring, structured and standardized interviews, and rethinking job requirements from the start.

So why are these approaches potentially better suited to a world where anyone can use AI to generate a polished application — cover letter and resume — within seconds?

Kat Kibben: If you've worked in recruiting long enough, you know there's always a nuance. I jokingly say I only trust recruiting experts who acknowledge the nuance. So I want to emphasize a bit of nuance upfront.

I feel like skills first hiring and AI approaches work great for companies where you hire maybe four kinds of people. Take a consulting firm — they typically have an entry-level role, a manager, a director, and a most senior manager. They hire every single person into those roles with some kind of specialty, and that's basically the depth of the roles. In those spaces, because you have enough data to define what "good" means, I think skills first hiring and AI approaches are highly applicable and something you should be implementing right now, because you know what good looks like. You have a very clear definition of what your highest performers do, and you can work backwards into a system that helps you identify that.

But if you hire across 50 roles and 39 of those are unique job descriptions, I'm not sure those same systems are going to help you — or if they'll just become a false proxy for success, helping you define a finish line that you actually don't know is the right one.

Anne: You talked about how the cover letter would be very valuable for roles where someone is applying to be a writer of some sort, especially if they're writing blogs or creative content, or even content marketing. You want to see their writing style. How would that differ from providing a writing sample?

Kat Kibben: Let's use McKinsey as an example. I don't believe those consultants are writing letters of interest to clients — they get a lot of their business from networking and building relationships. So I might use a writing sample where I ask them to write an email communicating urgency to a client.

"We have a 24-hour timeline where we need a response from this client. Please write the email you would send to communicate urgency." That's going to tell me a lot about that person's ability to be professional, communicate clearly, and be concise. It's also going to show how they relate to the client — and all of those things are far more useful for determining if you can be successful at my company than a beautiful cover letter telling me about the incredible opportunity you'd like to have at our organization.

Anne: I think some of us felt a little twinge reading that.

Kat Kibben: And I think what you just tapped on is the same thing that happens when we cringe at job postings. The same thing happens with cover letters — they all sound the same, and all of us know we need to be different. Now what?

Anne: Exactly, and that transitions so well into the "now what" — because that's exactly what we want to address for HR professionals, managers, and candidates who are just trying to get their foot in the door at a company they're passionate about.

Let's start with the HR professionals, many of whom have been trained to use the cover letter as part of the screening process. After all these years, it just feels natural to think the cover letter is going to be part of this. So what are other ways they can find more information in a pile of candidates outside of the resume?

Kat Kibben: I actually think there's one step that can happen beforehand that can really help with this transition, and it's strictly defining exactly what you're looking for. When we talk about finding more information, it feels a little like Where's Waldo — is the answer under here, over there? Hiring managers go out there just trying to find the golden nugget, but what if the golden nugget isn't actually what we need?

I recommend that people create scorecards when writing the job posting that very clearly define four unique functions of that role, and very concisely define — for each of those four — the aptitude required, the tools used, the level of autonomy, the collaboration involved, and who they present ideas to. That's a very high-level version of the scorecard, but what it enables is a very clear definition where everything becomes a yes or no. Because if you've ever been part of a hiring process, you know the "maybe" is the problem.

Anne: I like that. And I think naturally through that process, you determine whether the cover letter is even needed for this specific role.

Kat Kibben: That's exactly it. Even using the McKinsey example — I might say communication is one of my four factors. I need to know they can communicate urgency professionally. I need to know they can communicate at a high level with senior executive clients. So I would define it as: they can write emails that are respectful, considerate, and mindful of other people's time. And then one way to benchmark that is to ask them to write the email.

When you build it that way, you start to see consistency from "I need this" all the way to "I hired this person." Any inconsistency in that process is where bias creeps in, and we end up making really critical mistakes that cost our business, our teams, and frankly, our sanity. If you've ever hired the wrong person, you know.

Anne: How could HR professionals make the case to leadership or the hiring manager for why they do or don't recommend using a cover letter as a requirement?

Kat Kibben: If I'm running any kind of change management inside of an organization, I always coach HR to communicate the change in writing first, and then during an alignment meeting. We should not be hiring anyone if the hiring manager doesn't even have time to sit down and define what "good" means.

I want to emphasize that point strongly — we should not be order takers, meaning we just get the order and go find people. That is not how good hiring works. The last dimension is actually training the entire organization on how and why we are evolving our processes. There's so much value in bringing in external experts who have research, design, and high-volume experience to contextualize examples, because one of the mistakes we can make is having internal people presenting expertise they don't have. That's the easiest way to lose a lot of trust quickly in a process that is already what I would call very trust-sensitive — meaning one mistake can cost you a lot of that trust.

Anne: Going back to those hiring managers — the ones who will be working with this person day in and day out if they get hired — how should they build structured or standardized interviews and job requirements so they're actually testing for what matters, rather than just seeing who tweaked their AI prompt better?

Kat Kibben: I'm so excited you asked that, because this is literally what I've been working on — and it comes right back to the building blocks.

This one step has improved hiring manager interviews in every company I've worked with. You know those four pieces in the scorecard where we defined all of the skills? Now I assign an interviewer to each of those categories. This is where we bring the hiring manager in and allow them to pick the person they think is best qualified to assess each category. For example, for the aptitude and tools category, the hiring manager might be the best person, or a peer might be better — and you assign them that category.

The biggest mistake I see in interviewing — and where hiring managers really get lost — is thinking that when they sit down for an interview, they're supposed to interview you for everything. That's not it. Each interviewer should assess one category, with four interviews total, so that every category is evaluated. You have scoring and ranking on each of them, and you can make an accurate, equitable decision comparing every person based on the same criteria — building blocks every single step.

I think back to my very first hiring process where I wasn't the candidate. At the very end, the hiring manager chose a different person than the rest of us. There were five of us in the process — four of us picked candidate A, and the hiring manager picked candidate B, and they hired candidate B. I was so upset about the injustice of having been asked to give my input, only to have an opposite decision made. I have to believe that emotion exists in a lot of places where we end up working with people we didn't pick, with no insight into why that candidate was chosen.

Anne: That truly has a ripple effect on the people who are already working there. That's a really important point. Thank you, Kat.

So of course, we have to talk about the candidates — those long-term job seekers. Let's be real. They're probably frustrated because they're trying so hard. Maybe they've been unemployed for six months to a year, and they're mentally drained. A lot of us have been in this position, where you just want a hiring manager, HR professional, or screener to see you for who you really are. You wrote everything you could in your resume, you struggled with the cover letter — even with AI.

How can job seekers stand out, even with the help of AI, and what mindsets should they keep in mind when applying? Because again, it is draining.

Kat Kibben: The first thing I want any person who has applied to more than 100 jobs — whether it's been two months or 20 months — to hear is this: it's okay to be frustrated. It's okay to be annoyed. It's okay to be human, because your human intelligence is what's going to make you stand out.

So my first tip is to take a break. If you're feeling that kind of heaviness and you feel like you just can't push through, take an afternoon off and do something creative. Part of this is also the energy you're bringing to your applications.

But let me give you the practical tip too, because I know that telling you to take a break probably doesn't feel like enough. In the majority of scenarios I've encountered working with job seekers — if they've applied to that many jobs and gotten zero to fewer than five responses about their resume — something is missing from that content.

I have a breakdown I'll share the link for with Anne so she can pass it along. But the core issue is that your resume is likely missing scope and scale. As much as AI can get you to what we'd call standard good — the average of all examples — what your resume is probably missing is the context that allows an organization to understand that, yes, you can do the work, and yes, you can do it here.

Two ways you can easily incorporate scope and scale: First, add the industry of the company you worked at. I don't know the name of every company and what they do, and I always need to know that you have industry-relevant experience — especially for more senior roles. Just spelling out the industry bridges that information gap.

The second thing we're often lacking is numbers. Hiring managers frequently reject a candidate because they don't think the person can operate at their scale. If you managed a $1,000 budget but don't provide any numbers, I'll make an assumption — and that's often where rejections happen. If I have 200 applicants and 20 of them gave me all that information and 180 didn't, I'm taking the 20.

Anne: That leaves too much room for assumptions. I like that mindset a lot.

So let's wrap it up for our audience today. We put the question out there: is the art of the cover letter still alive and well, or is it losing its value? Now that we've discussed it in depth, what mindset do you want our audience to walk away with when it comes to the cover letter, the application, and the hiring process?

Kat Kibben: The question to ask is: does this help me understand if this is the right person for the job, based on a skill they would use every single day? That second part of the sentence is where we stopped for many, many years. We treated the cover letter like a blanket — "It'll help me understand." That was not always true.

So now, again, we're working backwards from the job. What actually helps us understand that someone can do the job — not write a cover letter? We don't actually need to hire people who know how to write cover letters. College career counselors need to know how to write cover letters, but I genuinely can't think of many other roles where someone has to write one for a living. That's kind of the whole math here: what does this person do every day? Is there an artifact of that work that I could use as a quick test sample to assess their fit? In 99% of the cases, the cover letter is not it.

Anne: Well, thank you so much for opening up our minds to the application and hiring process — and to how AI isn't the problem, but rather how we use it that will define the future of this process. We could honestly have 20 more conversations on this. Kat, you've been such a wonderful guest and provided such valuable insight, so thank you for bringing this conversation to light and for changing our perspectives today.

Kat Kibben: Thank you, and I'm looking forward to the next 20 conversations too.

Anne: All right, that's all for this week. We'll catch you next time. If you enjoyed our conversation today, be sure to subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts so you never miss a new episode.

Also, did you know All Things Work is more than a podcast? We're also a weekly newsletter that includes in-depth articles and the latest research from SHRM to keep you in the know. Just head to SHRM.org/allthingswork to sign up. Plus, follow SHRM on social media to view the latest clips and join the conversation on game-changing topics that are redefining the world of work.