I dunno why I post on LinkedIn these days. It has limited my reach to a few and then doesn’t bother to tell me if people respond. Maybe that will increase my desperation for algorithmic approval engagement.
At any rate, I recently wrote a bit about an experience I had with a recent job application which required a thoughtful, non-boilerplate cover letter answering questions posted in the job application–only to autoreject me because I failed on one of the “knockout” questions. These delightful things are ways to automatically reject resumes for arbitrary job-based reasons.
At any rate, here it is:
Career coaches often encourage job seekers to customize their resumes and to write focused cover letters even when an application doesn’t require it. I don’t think so.
I recently applied to an ecommerce QA Lead job for an ecommerce company which had a strange ask: Create a single cover letter+resume file, answer a series of questions, and explain your experience testing ecommerce Web sites. Do you have ecommerce experience? Oh, boy, mister, do I!
I went on at length, more than 2-3 sentences, about experience I have with ecommerce sites. I’ve handled tourist attractions which not only offered tickets and t-shirts but allowed room bookings with catering options (but the site did not have a sandbox, so testing stopped at the checkout step). I’ve handled user-posting storefronts where users post items and both pay and get paid. I’ve handled sites where content writers get paid affiliate fees on purchases, so you not only test the checkout through the process with the payment handler but that content writers get the appropriate fees credited to their account.
One of the questions was “What are the last three books you read?” Aw, yeah, right in my wheelhouse. At the time, the three were The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, The Law of Gun Barrel City by O.C. Marler, and River City P.I. by James R. Wilder. Since then, I’ve also completed The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, A Hereditary Book on the Art of War by Yagyū Munenori, and That Dunbar Boy by Jean Gould.
I didn’t spend two hours on the cover letter–probably just over an hour writing two pages answering the eight questions thoughtfully. I uploaded it into the application tracking system, and the next page had a series of questions, including The Knockout Question.
All of them were, probably, but this one had a yes or no answer to a presumed requirement which was not mentioned on the job board posting nor the job posting on the ATS. I answered honestly, and I was rejected in less time than I took in crafting the letter.
It makes sense to write personal cover letters for jobs for which your network connections recommend you and sometimes if the job is really for you, but job seekers have to balance the time required for each against the very real probability that the effort will be futile and the extra work will be unread.
Mostly, I just wanted to create a meme.
