4. PROOFREAD THE COVER LETTER
Once you've written your fabulous cover letter, you must sit down and read through it very carefully. Recruiters and employers tell many amusing stories about the errors that applicants make. These include:
- Addressing their letters to the correct street address, but wrong company or person
- Praising a company for accomplishments that were actually achieved by the company's competitors
- Failing to sign their names
- Failing to include the date
- Misspelling the recruiters' names
- Misspelling their own names
Don't make any of these errors, because you'll look like a clown. We just got a cover letter the other day, which praised the applicant's ability to "assess" things, but accidentally misspelled the word "asses." Slight difference. Another cover letter we received obviously wasn't proofread by the applicant, considering that many of his lowercase "i"s were actually "j"s. Go through your letter with a fine-toothed comb, then do so again, then get somebody else to read it - it's easy to miss errors when you wrote them. Find somebody that is really anal and picky, like your librarian, proctologist, or English teacher. If you don't know anybody like that, promise us that you'll get someone to look your letter over. It's really a musk. You see why?
Once you're certain that your letter is completely free of errors, it's internally consistent, you've signed it, you've got all the right names, titles, companies, and addresses on there, and there's no dried food on it, fold it up with your résumé and any other materials and send it on its way. We wish you the best of luck. Maybe -- just maybe -- that dream job working for that clever website you love will be yours. . .
