Four Parts to a Great Cover Letter (Part 3 of 4) — The Captivating Tale of YOU!

So, you’ve got the basics of cover letter formatting, grammar, and flow down, ensuring consistency with your resume. You’ve written a killer cover letter introduction, hooking the recruiter within those precious first few seconds. In particular, you’ve packed the Why that you’ve written for your introduction with so much value that your recruiter has no choice but to read on.

The stars are aligning — great!

Oh wait, now what?

You’ve got your recruiter’s attention, but now he/she wants to see the money. If you don’t do something quick, you’ll lose ‘em.

Now that you’ve hooked the recruiter, there’s no time to waste. With your professional experience paragraph, bring out the big guns, and bring them quickly. You recruiter will expect you to keep the promises you made in your introduction — delivering relevant, impactful information seamlessly and showing how you have and will add value.

To do so, you’ll tell The Captivating Tale of You, the greatest story that mankind has ever heard. In this story, you’re the hero who traverses the great corporate unknown, experiencing what he/she likes and dislikes, slaying the evil boss and/or co-worker demons, and discovering the treasure of the revenue you’ve generated / costs you’ve saved for your employers.

Throughout the story, you’ll tie your adventures back to the goals and needs of the recruiter’s firm, showing exactly how you’ll find treasure for them just like you’ve found treasure for your current / previous employers.

At the end of your tale, you’ll return to your homeland victorious, where the cheering crowd made up of your future employers await. Your story will naturally lead to the conclusion that your recruiter’s firm is the natural next step of your career. Through the recruiter’s firm, you’ll achieve your career goals, and the recruiter’s firm will meet theirs as well. A match made in heaven!

You might already be thinking that writing a story like this isn’t easy. You’re right. It’s really hard. But, the rewards in terms of more interviews → more job offers → more $$$ are well worth it.

We’ll show you exactly how writing this story is done with Miguel’s professional experience section, whose cover letter introduction we used as an example in part 1 of the cover letter series; you can navigate to the other parts in the series below:

1. The Basics — Formatting, Grammatical Errors, And The General Flow

2. The Introduction — Who, What, When, Where, Why

3. Your Work Experience — Show Why You’re The Perfect Fit With A Great Story (YOU ARE HERE!)

4. The Conclusion — Finish With A Memorable Flourish (coming soon)

Without further ado, let’s start!

Why A Story? Because Everyone Loves Them

Everyone loves a good story.

My guess is that it’s because real life sucks, and stories are an escape with which we can ignore the annoyances of our daily, boring lives.

Bit of a depressing start, but we can use this to our advantage. How?

Think about the recruiter for a second.

On a daily basis, he or she has to get up at 7:30 AM, head over to the office by 9 AM, and start going through hundreds of resumes and cover letters.

Most of them probably read like, “My name is Bob. I can do the job. Pls hire, tks.”

To the recruiter, maybe the badness of this letter was funny the first time, but at this point, the recruiter just roles his/her eyes and tosses the cover letter aside.

Then, your cover letter comes along. It’s… different from the others. It’s engaging. It’s relevant. And most importantly, it tells the recruiter exactly how you’ll add value in the new role through a riveting story.

After hooking the recruiter with your cover letter introduction, the story you write for your professional experience section will:

1. Continue capturing the recruiter’s attention so you can dive into the details without risking boring him/her.
2. Enable you to easily connect your professional experience history and accomplishments with how they’ll help your recruiter’s firm accomplish their goals.
3. Allow you to explain any extenuating circumstances that might have affected other parts of your job application.
4. Elaborate on the details of your resume’s best accomplishments and exactly how you positively impacted your previous employers.
5. Establish your recruiter’s firm as the natural next step in your career.

As you can see, your letter’s professional experience section presents a golden opportunity for you to really drive home what a perfect interview candidate you are.

And your story is the delivery vehicle for the sweet, sweet details.

OK, I’m Sold — What Does A Good Story Look Like?

In the next sections of this article, we’ll break down each part of what makes a good story.

A good story has the following five pieces:

1. The Nugget: One starting sentence that summarizes your story and prepares the recruiter on what’s coming. Important to set the recruiter’s expectations at the start of your story.
2. The Spark: One sentence describing what got you interested in the industry / profession.
3. The Adventure: One to two sentences on the various roles you took on the path to greatness.
4. The Treasure: Two to three sentences on the positive, quantified impact you made for your previous / current employers; bonus points if you use a bullet form format (don’t have to use complete sentences if you do this) or other structures to make your accomplishments easy to read for the recruiter.
5. The Conclusion: One sentence to tie things together and remind the recruiter how given your experience, you’re a natural fit for the role. As a side note, the recruiter should already implicitly understand that you are an excellent fit based on what you wrote for your nugget, spark, adventure, and treasure, but you can explicitly remind him/her here.

And now, the big reveal: Here’s what Miguel wrote for his story.

Each feature release achieving the increasingly impossible drives me to build new cloud products in greenfield markets. Fifteen years ago, my first role as a cloud solutions architect sparked my interest in the rapidly-developing field. I enjoyed the technical side but discovered the excitement of managing the entire product lifecycle. After five years building out cloud solutions for SMBs, I moved to Asia as a cloud-focused product manager where I launched more than 50 cloud features for several large tech firms. My major accomplishments include:

• At Amazon, releasing 15 features for AWS Lambda in Asia, which grew DAU by 100K and drove $2.5M MRR
• At Salesforce, penetrating greenfield markets in China and Japan with Sales Cloud platform features that yielded 10K SMB users
• At Google, increased daily requests sent by 25% and D30 retention by 5 percentage points with new Chinese automation features

With my prior Chinese and Japanese cloud expertise, I view IBM’s Security Ecosystem Product Manager role as an exciting opportunity to build a product from the ground-up.

Overall, these five parts should total no more than 200–250 words (to ensure that you don’t start losing your recruiter’s attention), so you don’t have a lot of real estate to work with. That being said, this word count should be plenty if you write the story correctly.

Now that we have a good base to work off of, let’s examine Miguel’s nugget in greater detail.

The Nugget — Prepare The Recruiter For Your Tale

In his nugget, Miguel highlights what drives him and his career:

Each feature release achieving the increasingly impossible drives me to build new cloud products in greenfield markets.

While seemingly simple, it does these important things:

1. Naturally transitions from his more formal cover letter introduction to his spark, which switches the tone of his letter to “story-mode.”
2. Orients the recruiter to what motivates Miguel to keep working in the Asian cloud markets, so the recruiter starts thinking “OK, Miguel’s whole career is about this motivating factor.”
3. Eventually connects Miguel’s career goal (building new cloud products in greenfield markets) with what IBM’s role entails, aligning fit.

The nugget itself shouldn’t take more than one sentence worth of space (10–20 words) since it doesn’t contain any of the juicy quantified accomplishments and relevant experience that the recruiter is looking for.

But these 10–20 words are critical to getting the flow of the professional experience story correct with the three factors above. Ultimately, with a proper nugget, Miguel’s accomplishments (in the treasure part) will make a much stronger impact on the recruiter.

When bringing us their cover letters for the first time, most of our clients elect to skip adding a nugget, claiming that it takes up space to elaborate more on their accomplishments. And at first, it doesn’t seem very helpful given its simplicity.

But that’s the wrong attitude to take.

A little preparatory work goes a long way. Again, a good nugget will make your accomplishments stronger.

When writing your nugget, you can base it off of any of the following:

• Career motivations and goals
• A one-sentence summary of your entire professional experiences section
• Explicitly state how your experiences are a good fit for the role (basically state your conclusion in your nugget)
• Your best accomplishment, summarized
• Etc.

With my clients, I like to use “career motivations and goals” because you’ll state the other parts elsewhere in your story.

Further, the recruiter will closely examine whether your motivations fit what the role entails, so you should make your recruiter’s life easier by stating it upfront.

To recap, a good nugget frames your story and enhances the impact your accomplishments (the treasure piece) will make on the recruiter.

The Spark — In The Beginning, There Was You

After using the nugget to frame his story and key in the recruiter to his career motivations, Miguel then elaborates on his spark:

Fifteen years ago, my first role as a cloud solutions architect sparked my interest in the rapidly-developing field.

His spark accomplishes the following:

1. Orients the recruiter to the beginning of his career and sets the stage for him to present his adventure and treasure pieces.
2. Informs the recruiter of his technical expertise in addition to his business skills as a product manager.
3. Tells the recruiter his total career length, which may be another job requirement.

Just as any good story follows a natural progression, so to should you follow your nugget with a spark.

Unlike in the cover letter introduction in which you can mix and match the 5 W’s, your story should follow a linear path.

Use the spark to set the stage for the beginning of your career; you’re telling the recruiter, “Start here!”

You should take care not to start your spark in the wrong place. Use common sense depending on where you are in your career. Don’t start your spark when you were born, for instance.

For entry-level professionals (with three years of experience or less), start your spark in college. You could use a club activity or an internship as the impetus for your interest in a career field.

For mid-level to experienced professionals (with more than three years of experience), you can start your spark either at your first job or the first relevant job for the role you’re applying to.

It’s important you think critically about what and where you pick your spark as it will frame the adventure portion of your story. If, after writing the rest of your story, you feel it’s either too long or short, then one potential issue could be your spark. If that’s the case, adjust your spark forward or backward in time accordingly.

Just as Miguel uses the spark to showcase related experience or skills (technical expertise), you can too.

For example, if you were applying to a business analyst role, your spark could be an internship where you had to use SQL to collect data and build a presentation that resulted in management launching a new strategic initiative.

Or, like Miguel, if you were applying to a product management role, your spark could be your first role as a software engineer where you worked closely with the product manager to refine a mobile app’s UI based on user interviews.

You get the idea.

In sum, the spark should set the stage for the adventure portion of your story but also is an opportunity for you to enhance the recruiter’s perception of your fit based on related experience.

The Adventure — Travel To Land’s Unknown For Corporate Fortune

After stating his career motivations and setting the stage for the adventure portion of his story with the spark, Miguel is ready to talk about his relevant experience for IBM’s role:

I enjoyed the technical side but discovered the excitement of managing the entire product lifecycle. After five years building out cloud solutions for SMBs*, I moved to Asia as a cloud-focused product manager where I launched more than 50 cloud features for several large tech firms.

*SMB stands for small-medium business, a common acronym

What does Miguel do well here?

1. Covers 15 years of experience in two sentences. He could have gone on and on about each and every role he had during those 15 years. Instead, Miguel only covers the highlights — critical moments that were turning points in his career.
2. Within these two sentences, smoothly transitions. There’s absolutely no breakage in flow here. Every sentence, every word naturally flows into the next as you would expect with a story.
3. Quantifies where he can. Miguel does this in two places. Once, where he states he worked for five years in a technical role, and the second time where he mentions launching 50 cloud features. While not critical in the adventure portion of the story, quantification where possible qualifies your experience for the recruiter.
4. Gives thoughtful rationale for his career switches. When Miguel switches careers (from a technical role to product management), he gives a reason for doing so. The recruiter should always perceive your career switches to be deliberate, tactical, and strategic. Never state that you switched careers because of money or “just because.”
5. Effectively sets the stage to deliver the treasure. The last sentence of Miguel’s adventure prepares the recruiter to read the treasure section of his story. As with the nugget and the spark, each portion of the story should flow into each other.

Especially for experienced professionals, condensing long work histories into a couple of sentences can be difficult, but the key is that you don’t have to say everything.

Only mention critical and relevant experience / information to the recruiter; anything else won’t fit in that one to two sentence constraint (part of the reason I’ve limited it to one to two sentences for my clients is to deliberately eliminate fluff from my clients’ stories).

Additionally, you also don’t have to list every critical event, just the ones that are relevant to the story you’re telling the recruiter.

I define critical as:

• Major career path changes (in either function / industry / both)
• Geographic changes
• Major promotions
• Upgrades from smaller companies to brand name firms
• Educational changes (going to get your master’s or MBA)
• Major life events, positive or negative
• Major corporate events (M&A, divestitures, etc.)
• Etc.

The adventure portion of your story is also an opportunity to explain extenuating circumstances. These include events such as:

• Caring for sick relatives
• Job losses
• Participation in special programs (boot camps, Rhodes Scholars, etc.)
• Gaps in resume
• Debilitating diseases
• Etc.

The longer the gap in your resume (generally anything longer than a few months), the more likely you should at least reference the gap in your story.

If you don’t say anything, your recruiter will assume the worst (that you couldn’t land a job because you weren’t good enough, that you intentionally let your skillset deteriorate, or that you’re just lazy).

You should absolutely say something if you were caring for sick relatives or some other charitable act. As an example, one of our clients couldn’t work a full-time job for two years because he was taking care of his aging mother.

Lastly, the final sentence of your adventure should reference the goals of the hiring manager’s firm and set you up to deliver your major quantified accomplishments in the treasure portion of your story. This last sentence will typically describe your latest / current role.

In summary, use your story’s adventure to guide the recruiter from your spark to your treasure along a path that contains relevant experience / roles; try to quantify along the way!

The Treasure — Discover Revenue, Cost Savings, And Other Riches

Finally, the moment we’ve built everything up to — showing your recruiter the treasure you found in the form of revenue generation / cost savings / moving other metrics for your previous / current employer.

This portion is arguably the most important part of your story (and even of your whole letter) in which you display in all its glory how much impact you made throughout your career.

Miguel does an excellent job of this here:

My major accomplishments include:

• At Amazon, releasing 15 features for AWS1 Lambda in Asia, which grew DAU by 100K and drove $2.5M MRR
• At Salesforce, penetrating greenfield markets in China and Japan with Sales Cloud platform features that yielded 10K SMB users
• At Google, increased daily requests sent by 25% and D305 retention by 5 percentage points with new Chinese automation features

Key takeaways to point out:

1. Use of bullets to organize his impact. Clients tend to assume that you should reserve bullets for your resume, but they’re actually a great secret weapon for cover letters (especially as not many people think to use them). They’re a great way to present critical information without using long, drab blocks of text that most cover letters traditionally use.
2. Plainly defined KPIs that he influenced. There’s no confusion as to what numbers he moved. Clear statement of the metrics within at least a few words of the actual numbers is required.
3. Use of select in-line bolding to highlight the numbers. To further call attention to his metrics, Miguel selectively bolds the metrics and their corresponding numbers. A smart move, but be careful not to go overboard with bolding in cover letters. Limit bolding to just highlighting the impact you made on KPIs.
4. Clear and succinct language. Miguel doesn’t use any extraneous words by limiting use of passive voice and focusing solely on the metrics he moved.
5. Acronyms are tailored to his audience. Caution here. While not everyone will understand what AWS, DAU, or MRR stand for, his audience, the product team at IBM and the recruiter, will understand. You should know your audience and use your best judgement as to whether acronyms are appropriate. Proper use of acronyms can enhance your standing with the recruiter as they’ll assume “you’re one of them.”
6. Metrics are organized by company. In general, more structure is better than less. In this case, Miguel organizes the KPIs he influenced by company, which is a good way to do it if you’re an experienced professional with several years of work history. You could also organize KPIs by type, geography, or in descending order by impact. Use your best judgement.
7. Relevant KPIs are chosen specifically for IBM’s product goals. A more nuanced point, but important to point out. Even with his likely pick-of-the-litter in terms of what KPIs he could put on his cover letter, Miguel doesn’t just choose any random KPIs — he chooses ones that he knows will be directly relevant to the goals of the IBM team, effectively saying, “I’ve done exactly what you guys need.” As stated previously, tailoring every part of your cover letter (and job application overall) to the job posting is critical.

Whew, that was a lot to unpack.

But the key takeaway is that Miguel clearly delivers the recruiter a relevant list of major KPIs he’s influenced.

In sum, he shows that he’s done what the IBM team needs and that he could do the same for them.

All they need to do is hire him.

The Conclusion — Your Recruiter’s Firm Is The Sequel

So, we’ve presented the nugget, started at the spark, traversed the adventure, and discovered the treasure. Surely, we’re done?

Not quite!

The conclusion is your opportunity to tie your whole story together in one neat bow. With just one sentence, Miguel does this amazingly well:

With my prior Chinese and Japanese cloud expertise, I view IBM’s Security Ecosystem Product Manager role as an exciting opportunity to build a product from the ground-up.

Here’s what he does:

1. Reiterates his relevant experience to the IBM team. While you should be indirectly referencing your relevant experience for the role, explicitly stating it in your conclusion is a great way to drive the point home and sum everything up for your recruiter. Miguel does this well in the first part of his conclusion sentence.
2. Connects his career goals to the goals/needs of the IBM team. Recall in his spark, Miguel mentioned his goal of launching new cloud products in greenfield markets? As described in the cover letter introduction, IBM’s team needs a product manager to launch new products in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean greenfield markets. Connecting these two items together enhances the perception of his fit with the recruiter.
3. Naturally transitions away from his story and into the conclusion paragraph of his overall cover letter. He does so by summarizing a portion of his relevant experience, which signals his story’s end. Miguel does a great job preserving the flow of his letter all throughout his story.

Like the spark, while also seemingly an insignificant one-sentence portion of your story, the conclusion is deceptively important.

How many movies have you watched that had poor endings? For me, too many to count.

A bad ending can ruin the entire movie, even if it’s just a small portion of the total film length.

You don’t want the recruiter to read your cover letter all the way through your story, only to be thrown off by an ugly / non-existent conclusion. Tying everything together in a satisfying way will leave the recruiter thinking, “Wow, we should absolutely give this person an interview, it just makes sense to do so.”

So, take the time to tie everything together with a good conclusion!

Final Thoughts

Wow, we covered a lot.

We dived into each of the five important portions of a story that makes up the professional experiences section of your cover letter, including:

1. The Nugget
2. The Spark
3. The Adventure
4. The Treasure
5. The Conclusion

While it’s very difficult to write a good story, it’s paramount to getting your recruiter to pay attention to your letter long enough such that you can:

1. Show alignment of your career goals with the role
2. Demonstrate relevant experience
3. Describe the impact you’ve made

A good story is the ideal conduit with which you deliver information to your recruiter.

And ultimately, it’ll land you that job offer.

Next up, the Conclusion (and of this series)!

Feel free to read the other parts of our four-part cover letter series here:

1. The Basics — Formatting, Grammatical Errors, And The General Flow
2. The Introduction — Who, What, When, Where, Why
3. Your Work Experience — Show Why You’re The Perfect Fit With A Great Story (YOU ARE HERE!)
4. The Conclusion — Finish With A Memorable Flourish (coming soon)

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