How do you write a cover letter?

Two beliefs circulate about cover letters, and both pull the wrong way. One says nobody reads it anyway, write ten words and move on. The other says the opposite, if I squeeze in the right keywords I climb the ranking. We will answer both not by guessing but by following the path the text takes through the system.

On a career page built with GoTeam the cover letter sits in the last section of the form and it is compulsory. The text you write is saved to the database and reaches a person in the application detail under a Cover Letter heading. So far, the expected part.

Here is the unexpected part: the function building the evidence set of position fit scoring takes seven fields from the form, and the cover letter is not among them. The optional technical skills and experience box next to it is in the set. The compulsory box does not enter the measurement and the optional one does. That is not a fault, it is a deliberate boundary: scoring looks at verifiable evidence, and a statement of intent is not a verifiable thing.

• A cover letter exists to be read, not to be measured. Its value lies in being the one place the score does not touch.
• The company does not write the text of the question, it is fixed in code; the only thing that changes is the company name slotted into it.
• Unlike the cover letter, posting specific questions do enter the evidence set. Take that into account when you spread your effort.

Two boxes sit side by side in the open ended section of the application form. The upper one, technical skills and experience, has no star, so it is optional. The lower cover letter box carries a star. Its label mentions the company name, but the company does not write the sentence: the text is fixed in code and only the company name is filled into the template. Whichever GoTeam career page you visit, you see the same question.

The only concrete consequence of it being compulsory is a lower bound: at least ten characters. The rule is the same in the browser and on the server, and there is no way around it. But ten characters is not a quality measure, it is a threshold stopping the field from going out empty. An application saying I am interested goes through too.

There is no upper bound the candidate sees. The only upper bound with a counterpart in the code lives in the panel: while editing an application, the hiring team can enter at most 5000 characters into the cover letter field. Do not read that as a target; read it as a reminder that the text is read in the panel as a single block.

• The question does not change with the posting, only the company name is slotted in.
• The field cannot be switched off per company, cannot be made optional, and its question cannot be changed.
• The only section a company can shape is the posting specific questions section.

When an application arrives, two layers run: the evidence extracted from the CV, and what you declared on the form. Why does the second stand apart? A CV cannot show your year of study, your internship type or the department you declared, and a form can. That is why form declarations are gathered as a separate evidence list.

That list is built from these rows: university, department, year of study, grade average, technical skills, internship type, location. The answers to the posting specific questions are appended at the end. The cover letter is not on the list. This is not true of one path only, it is true of every path: the same function is used by the grader that runs the model and by the grader that runs in code.

The model produces no score anyway. Item by item it answers whether something is evidenced in this CV, leaves a verbatim quote from the CV next to each answer, and the arithmetic is done in code. The quotes are validated in code; a quote coming from outside the permitted set is dropped. Because a sentence you wrote in the cover letter is not in that set, it cannot come back as a quote either.

The requirement lines in a posting are not a decorative list: that same list is the source of the grading criteria, and the lines carry weights. Even though a cover letter is not scored, that list tells you plainly which evidence the other side is looking for. This is the text to read before you start writing.

The posting specific questions at the bottom of the form are a separate category. The company defines them itself for that posting, and your answers enter the evidence set of scoring in the form label: answer. The reasoning is written in the code too: a CV cannot show whether you hold a driving licence, and a form can. If something was asked, its answer is looked for in that box, not in the CV.

The practical consequence is about how you spread your effort. A posting can hold at most twenty specific questions; short text, long text, single choice, multiple choice and date types are used. These boxes look short so they get rushed, yet they are the side that enters the measurement.

• Read the requirement lines one by one; that is the only list showing which evidence is wanted.
• Fill in the posting specific questions completely, and be concrete even in the short answers.
• A choice field can hold at most fifty options; find the option that fits you in the list, not the nearest one.

The hiring team sees the cover letter in the application detail. The layout is this: Cover Letter on the left, Technical Skills to its right, and a Role Specific Questions definition list beneath them. If all of those fields are empty, the block is not drawn at all. Your text is not read as a page of its own, it is read as a short column.

That layout also settles what to write. The column on the right already lists the skills, and the list below already answers the posting specific questions. That leaves the cover letter column one job: why this company, why this role, and which line of the CV supports it. Repeating the skill list here wastes the space of the column.

A concrete test: delete one of the sentences you wrote. If no meaning is lost, that sentence was filler. Lines such as I am someone open to developing myself say nothing, because they are written the same way on every application. A sentence saying I used this product of yours and got stuck at this part leaves something behind despite its length.

• Let the first sentence say why you applied here, not who you are.
• Let the second part tie to a line in the CV; a cover letter points at that line, it does not replace it.
• Let the last sentence say what you want to do, not a thank you formula.
• Do not leave a pasted company name behind; the company name is already inside the question, and a text that does not match shows at a glance.

The first check is the posting specific questions. An answer left blank or brushed off with a single word means a missing row in the evidence set. Shifting some of the time you spent on the cover letter over here is the one direct contribution you can make to the side that gets measured.

The second check is consistency. If you mentioned a tool, a project or a certificate in the cover letter, make sure the same thing is written in the CV. Information sitting only in the cover letter does not enter the measurement; on top of that, the gap between the two texts is noticed by the person reading them.

The third check is the file. There is no field for uploading a cover letter as a separate document: on the candidate side the only file uploaded is the CV, only a PDF is accepted, and the limit is 5 MB. Do not try to write your cover letter into a Word document and attach it, paste the text into the box.

• Every posting specific question is filled and the right option is marked in the choice fields.
• Every concrete claim in the cover letter has a counterpart in the CV.
• The CV is a single file, a PDF, and under the 5 MB limit.
• The text is written to be read in the panel as a single block: no headings, no lists, plain paragraphs.

These two fields sit next to each other on the form and look like the same thing, yet they follow completely different paths inside the system. One is fixed and outside the measurement, the other is posting specific and inside it.

The table below compares them row by row. Every row has a counterpart in the code; none of it is advice, it is how the product behaves today.

Knowing where a text does not go is as useful as knowing where it does: most wasted effort comes out of a wrong assumption. The three limits below are read from the code.

A cover letter being read is not a guarantee, it is a possibility, and what decides that possibility is not in your hands. The most concrete limit is permission: for a user without permission to see personal data the cover letter field arrives masked, and the masking is done on the server, not in the interface. One member of a team may be able to read the text while another cannot.

The second limit is about the setup. AI grading can be switched on and off per company. In a setup where it is off, neither CV analysis nor position fit runs at all; there is no scoring, and a person reads the application end to end. At such a company the weight of a cover letter naturally rises.

The third is about who holds the decision. AI changes the status of no application on its own; it ranks, and it lists the evidence items and their quotes. The call to advance or reject is always made by a user, that is, a person. There is no such thing as a model disliking your cover letter, but the possibility of it not being read is always there.

• For a user without permission the field is masked; because the masking happens on the server, it cannot be bypassed.
• An item with no evidence does not count as half a point, it leaves the denominator; the absence of evidence is not a shortcoming of the candidate.
• AI eliminates nobody, it produces suggestions; the action that changes a status is tied to a user.