How‌ ‌to‌ ‌Write‌ ‌the‌ ‌Body‌
‌of‌ ‌a‌ ‌Cover‌ ‌Letter‌

Look beyond your resume.

Show what makes you especially well-suited for the job beyond your work history, skills and education. For example, you might mention job-related awards, volunteer or community service work that made a lasting impact, or as HR consultant Erin Riska advises, add testimonials from colleagues or past employers, or include a quote from a great performance review.

You’ll also stand out if you share a related anecdote that pertains to the position. For instance, have you been a loyal customer of this company for many years, or has the company’s product or service benefitted you or your family in some way? If so, you have a personal connection to the brand, which can make for a compelling story. These unique details help create an interesting and unique narrative and provide a personal connection between you and the company or the job.

Let Your Personality Shine

Don’t be shy. Make sure your personality shines through by keeping a conversational tone. As writer Cathie Ericson points out, you’ve got to strike a balance between too formal and too casual. You don’t want hiring managers to see you as uptight, so it’s important to be conversational in your cover letter body paragraphs, but you still have to be appropriate and use impeccable grammar and spelling.

Use powerful language.

The careful use of power words — verbs or nouns that inspire, encourage or evoke an emotional response — such as “winning,” “thrilling,” “remarkable,” “thrive” and “devoted” help convey action and describe experiences in a dynamic way. They can add persuasive flair to the body of your cover letter while grabbing the hiring manager’s attention and even influence them to take action, according to writer John Morrow.

There are hundreds of power nouns, adjectives and verbs that work in a number of combinations to uniquely describe job qualifications. The chart below gives some examples of powerful verbs you can use to convey some of the top skills employers look for.

Use numbers.

We can’t stress this enough: Employers want to see numbers that show the impact of your past achievements because they add credibility to your experience and because they show what you are capable of doing for them. But don’t just copy and paste achievements from the work history of your resume. Instead, for each experience you mention, choose the most recent and notable achievement you reached using the skills and discuss it in depth. Just like the skills you choose to highlight, the achievements you quantify should matter to the hiring manager, and therefore they should be directly relevant to the team, the company’s goals, your profession and the job description.

So if you are applying to be a cook, for example, and the business is looking for an efficient and creative cook who takes initiative and can help them increase table turnover times, you might go into depth about a process you initiated for your last job that increased kitchen efficiency by 35 percent; how you reduced food and labor costs by 20 percent; or how you were named Employee of the Month four times the previous year. But you wouldn’t mention how you fielded 300 + calls per day or created a new scheduling system that increased accuracy by 25 percent when you were working as a receptionist six years ago.