As an entry-level web designer, I was doing my job search in the designer-saturated Bay Area during the height of the economic downturn, sending cover letter after cover letter.
The ideal cover letter is customized to the job posting and the company, but I got so sick of tailoring dozens of cover letters a day with almost the same content in a slightly different order. It seemed like such a pointless task, especially when it often ended in rejection anyway. It seemed to me that good designer should be able to design a way out of tedious soul-crushing tasks like that. So I did.
This cheeky cover letter generator is built from a cross section of all of the cover letters I had written over the previous month. I looked at
- what skills I personally excelled at and wanted to demonstrate with a sentence or anecdote
- which skills were listed in the job postings I was most excited about
I paired these key attributes with a sentence demonstrating how I showed each in my work history. I built a javascript tool that would allow me to quickly rearrange these anecdotes by dragging-and-dropping or deleting the paired keyword, to perfectly match the criteria listed on the job ad. I added a fields to let me customize the overall focus, company name, and addressee of the cover letter
I got my first paid freelance design job within days of creating this tool, and I’ve haven’t had the soul crushing task of manually retailoring a single cover letter since. You can create your own cover letter here.