How to Write a Cover Letter

A cover letter is not a summary of your CV in prose. It answers one question the CV cannot: why this job, at this company, now. Get that right in 250 words and it does its job. Anything longer and it will not be read at all.

The four-paragraph structure

1. Why you are writing, and the hook

   Name the exact role and where you saw it. Then one sentence of your strongest, most relevant fact — the one thing you would say if you had ten seconds.

2. Proof

   Two or three sentences that back the hook with a specific result. Take the single best bullet from your CV and expand it: what the situation was, what you did, what changed.

3. Why this employer

   One or two sentences showing you know something real about them — a market they are entering, a project they announced, the kind of clients they serve. This is the paragraph that separates a sent-to-forty letter from a sent-to-one letter.

4. The practical close

   Availability, visa status, notice period, and a plain request for an interview. No flourishes.

A worked example

Dear Ms Haddad,

I am applying for the Accounts Payable Supervisor role advertised on
your careers page on 14 August. I currently run AP for 140 suppliers
at Gulf Interiors LLC, where I cut invoice-to-payment time from
21 days to 9.

I did that by replacing ad-hoc approvals with a weekly batch run in
Tally ERP 9 and agreeing revised payment terms with our twelve largest
suppliers. It removed roughly 30 hours of chasing per month from the
team and ended the late-payment penalties we had been absorbing. In
the same period I closed monthly accounts for three entities inside
five working days, down from twelve.

Your job advert mentions consolidating three finance teams onto one
ERP after the Sharjah acquisition. That migration is the part of the
role I want. I ran the Tally-to-Zoho move at my last employer for a
smaller ledger, and the lesson I took was that supplier master data
has to be cleaned before, not during, the cutover.

I hold a transferable employment visa and can start within 30 days.
My CV is attached, and I would welcome the chance to discuss the role.

Yours sincerely,
Sana Iqbal
+971 5X XXX XXXX · sana.iqbal@email.com

That is 218 words. Note what it does not contain: no "I am a hard-working and dedicated professional", no restatement of the CV's education section, and no paragraph about how excited the candidate is. The third paragraph is the one that costs effort and earns the interview.

Openings to avoid

Formatting and sending

• One page, never more. 200–300 words is the target.
• Match the CV. Same font, same header block, same contact details. A letter that looks like a different document from a different person undermines both.
• Paste it into the email body as well as attaching the PDF. Many recruiters read on a phone and will not open two attachments.
• Subject line: Accounts Payable Supervisor — Sana Iqbal — available in 30 days. Role, name, and the one fact they screen on.
• Name the file properly: Sana-Iqbal-Cover-Letter-AP-Supervisor.pdf.

When you should not send one

If the advert says "no cover letter", do not send one. If the application form has a 500-character "why are you applying" box, that box is the cover letter — put paragraphs one and three in it and skip the attachment. And if you genuinely cannot write a third paragraph about that specific employer, that is worth noticing: a generic letter is slightly worse than no letter, because it proves you sent the same thing to everyone.

Write my cover letter — free →

Read next