How To Format A Cover Letter That Can Help You Land A Job

Cover letter formatting can have an adverse effect, if not done right. While creating a cover letter for your professional portfolio, you need to be sure about two things:

Your cover letter formatting should be perfect and must be presentable, which also follow all the rules and guideline of the formatting etiquettes.

Secondly, your cover letter must be structured in such a way so that it can help the hiring managers of an organization to understand your value proposition as early as possible,

But the challenge is that most of the job seekers who are willing to bag their dream jobs, don’t know how to format a cover letter effectively. But as a professional resume writer, I want you to know that it takes not more than 10 minutes for you to be ahead of all the competition?

Well, here are some guidelines for you.

How To Format A Cover Letter

First of all, you need to know that there are 5 parts of a cover letter:

1. The header

2. The salutation

3. The central paragraph with your offer

4. Call to action

5. Sign off

• HEADER:

Your header consists of your name, job title, address, contact information including your phone number, email addresses and other social media profiles like LinkedIn. After which you must put the date when you are sending or submitting the resume cover letter. The contact information of the hiring manager must be followed to that.

While writing a business cover letter, this part is essential.

• SALUTATION:

Though the salutation part can be varied for each of the job seekers, there are specific guidelines one must follow in this segment too. You don’t want your hiring manager to get bored after reviewing your job application letter, right? If you wish your hiring managers to be excited to interview you, that can also be achieved.

Always prefer to address your hiring managers by their names. You can add “Dear” as the prefix. But you must not use terms like “Whomsoever it may concern”, “Dear Sir/Madam” or “Hey Team” instead.

Once you put the right name at the place, it helps you to grab the attention of your hiring manager.

• THE PARAGRAPH:

Your paragraph must not carry information which is very obvious like “I am writing this in response to your job offer” etc. Rather be very specific and make your paragraph of offering or motivation to be more appealing.

You can choose sharing your achievements, something you love about the company, recent awards, or any exciting fact that you think is appropriate to share with your hiring manager.

Remember when the central paragraph is more about them than it’s about you, you get more opportunity to steal the deal. You must mention what you have to offer to the organization in the application letter, instead of what you want to get out of it.

• CALL TO ACTION:

If your hiring managers have come a long way to get you an opportunity to get interviewed by them, don’t upset them with an awkward call to action. It must be very compelling for your hiring manager to give you an appointment call.

Be very specific in your call to action. You can ask for a call or meeting, or even you can restate how you can help the organization to achieve its objectives.

• SIGN OFF:

With this segment, you get over with the chance of making your Cover letter any better. This is the closing of your cover letter. Thus, you may prefer thanking the hiring managers for their time to go through your cover letter of a professional profile. Use sincerely in the end or synonyms of the same. Don’t forget to write your name in full and your necessary contact details.

Source: How to Format a Cover Letter