Candidates for academic positions hear one piece of advice early and often: Tailor a cover letter to the job as well as to the institution and the department. But what about the hiring side of that exchange? We don’t talk as much about what to look for, as an administrator, in a candidate’s all-important cover letter.
No job document is more amenable to personalization and customization than the cover letter. Having read thousands of letters and written more than a few myself, I think they are a more-nuanced genre now than when I wrote one in 1995 applying for my first tenure-track position. Back then I saw my cover letter as a tool to connect with a department that was hiring. After getting a faculty job and serving on a search committee myself, I began to think of the cover letter as a key to unlock a candidate’s capabilities and affinities, character and fit. Now, a quarter century later, I appreciate that a cover letter can offer useful insights to faculty recruiters yet also be weaponized through overinterpretation and inflated expectations.
In the Admin 101 series on higher-education leadership, I’ve focused recent columns on the ins and outs of academic hiring. An underlying theme: Any search you even partially control should, above all, be fair and humane. That is especially true when assessing the painstakingly crafted cover letters of anxious job candidates. So how can you efficiently, presciently, and justly read a cover letter (also known as a letter of interest) to discover what you need to know? Here are some questions to consider.
Are you reading the letter efficiently and consistently? Hiring administrators and search committees must agree on how to review all the candidate materials systematically (to avoid wasting a lot of time) and fairly (to treat each one the same). I recall a friend of mine describing that on his first stint on a search committee he was appalled that some colleagues had spent hours dissecting each letter while others just “skimmed for pet peeves or likes” and still others read only the first and last paragraphs. That situation is not common — I hope — but neither is it anomalous.
That’s why it’s crucial to create a search matrix. By the time you are reading a cover letter (likewise a CV or a diversity statement) your search committee should have agreed in writing on the weighted characteristics, attributes, traits, and experiences that a candidate is required to demonstrate and the ones that fall under the category of preferred — good to have, but not essential. You should literally have a copy of that list in hand and check off every time a letter touches on one of those points. That way, you are not only being impartial to candidates but also able to efficiently compare them.
Another potential problem is committee fatigue: People often expend great time and effort scrutinizing the first set of candidate materials but run out of steam and end up giving the last set a much more fleeting (and thus haphazard) appraisal. If possible, try to get search-committee members to agree to devote a prescribed amount of time to each candidate portfolio. There is a chronological as well as a systematic dimension to being fair and efficient.
Is the letter generic? It seems shocking, given the weak state of the tenure-track job market in many fields, but a lot of candidates still don’t follow the routine advice to tailor cover letters to the hiring institution. Maybe some still don’t know that or maybe they refuse to customize their letters out of frustration with the hiring process or the state of the faculty job market. My impression is that roughly 20 percent of the cover letters I see are masterfully tailored for the particular job opening, while at the other extreme, some 20 percent are generically written with no customization. In between are letters that hit some points of symbiosis with the position but miss other opportunities.
As a hiring manager, you are reading these letters, first of all, to gauge if the candidates have read the job ad carefully and identified the required and preferred qualifications. You also want to discern if they’ve done at least some homework about your program, people, and institution. For example, a cover letter for a candidate applying for a department chair’s position should, at minimum, mention such obvious data as your institution’s enrollment trends, research emphases, student demographics, faculty successes, or strategic-plan goals.
A sign of deeper exploration is when a candidate cites specific challenges or initiatives on your campus. I was impressed, for example, when an applicant for a full-time instructorship in our college mentioned our goal to attract more Hispanic students from border counties in Texas and described her experience with a similar recruitment challenge within her state. She was not just flagging the issue to get our attention but actually thinking about how to help us.
Likewise, an engineering dean at a research university told me about a candidate who — in applying for a department chair’s position — had taken the time to review public documents from the department’s latest accreditation review and mentioned key issues in her cover letter: “She really did a deep dive and pulled out some insights and trends that I don’t think we had noted ourselves.” In short, she tailored the letter and used it to illustrate her analytical skills.
To be fair, sometimes those of us who have held the same position for a while forget the sheer brain-melting slog of being on the job market, especially for a first-timer. According to my records, I applied for 17 tenure-track positions in the last year of my doctoral program; I was offered three; I took one. I remember that it became progressively harder to muster the mental energy and attention to “tailor” my application materials as much as my advisers were telling me to do. My qualifications didn’t change but my stamina for the hiring process eroded.
So expect a tailored cover letter but not a microscopic-level understanding of your campus.
Does the letter offer evidence of the candidate’s fit for this position? Cover letters help you check boxes. An applicant may state, “I have been the teacher of record four times for the exact courses that you list as responsibilities for the position.” But you are also probing for intellectual capacity beyond the surface level of skills and experience. Ideally, in the case of teaching, the cover letters should tell you something more than just which classes the candidates have taught. How did they teach a particular course? What are their preferred textbooks and other course materials? What tactics do they use to improve student success? Do they have interesting ideas that expand on your institution’s curricular direction?
In terms of research, you are reading cover letters for evidence of ascent and continuity in the subfield. We award tenure for the future, not just the past. If you are hiring an assistant professor for a research-track position, you are projecting many decades of creativity, work ethic, and focus. You hope that the applicant’s letter gives you a sense of a path of productivity that matches the position but also suggests momentum. You shouldn’t require these letters to necessarily be passionate, but you are seeking signs that someone is looking for a calling and a career, not just a job.
A biology department chair described a compelling cover letter that had impressed everyone. The letter connected the candidate’s excitement about a line of research to how it would influence industry practice and lead to a cleaner environment. As the chair related, the cover letter gave the department a sense that this research was something the candidate believed in deeply, and hoped to devote a lifetime to perfecting.
Does the letter include personal touches that show a sense of connection to the place? Search committees are turned off by cover letters that are overly familiar and smarmy. On the other hand, many departments today are facing a hiring outlook that makes us yearn for a little bit more of a personal touch in the cover letter. Among the reasons for that:
- With fewer faculty searches being conducted, the importance of each one is magnified.
- The costs in human, material, and financial terms are enormous if a new hire does not work out (leaves after a few years, or fails to earn tenure).
- There is a perception, and I think a reality, that the current generation of new faculty members in their 20s and 30s is — and rightly so — extremely focused on cultural and individual satisfaction, not only in the workplace but in the location. Candidates are asking not only “Will I be happy among you people as a community of scholars?” but also “Will I (and my family) be happy in this location?”
So it’s important to read cover letters for signs that the candidates understand and are interested in being a part of your campus culture. Does anything in the experiences they mention show they will feel at home within the department, campus, and region?
I saw a very good instance of this in a job application several years ago. The candidate’s cover letter noted our institution drew a high number of rural, first-generation college students. In a concluding paragraph, she eloquently described how she came from that same background, albeit in a different part of the country, and could identify both with their ambitions and hopes and with our mission to be an accelerant for their lives and careers. As a hiring manager, that is exactly the sort of personal detail you are looking for. Her letter showed empathy without affectation. She made clear that she wanted to be part of our research team and also saw value in being part of our community.
Anyone who has written or read a cover letter knows that it’s part of an intricate and often frustrating genre of bureaucratic literature. You can toil away for hours trying to interpret a letter, and still come away unsatisfied that you have understood the candidate. Nevertheless, in reading a cover letter, try to answer one question: Do you want to know more, hear more, and engage more with this potential new colleague?
That said, we have an ethical imperative not to weaponize the reading of cover letters or any other hiring materials. Humans are human. They get tired. They fumble. And in the current job climate there is an air of desperation that palpably comes through in all too many applications.
When we read cover letters, we should be looking in a systematic fashion for the signs and portents that point to a successful match. But we should not cull anybody based upon just a few mistakes. (A colleague in the social sciences told me how one application was thrown onto the junk pile because the candidate had mistyped the name of a professor in the hiring program.) That’s why a cover letter should be treated as simply one document within an attempt to holistically appreciate a potential new colleague.
