Internship Cover Letter

Talent Community - Launch!

GrouperEye- Start the Revolution! Join a talent community. Get a job or internship. Gain a reputation.

The future of college recruiting is here.  September 15th marks the day that everything changes.  GrouperEye.com, a new website dedicated to changing college recruiting forever, has launched with a sexy new makeover.

What is GrouperEye?  It is a solution to the status quo.  It is a new way for students and companies to connect.  Most importantly, it is a better way to find the perfect job- or the perfect student to fill that job. GrouperEye allows companies to build talent communities.

How does it work?  Companies create profiles, run challenges, and post updates that students can follow.  Students are able to follow the companies they are interested in, impress them with their smarts in case challenges, and get their foot in the door with the companies they really care about.  Sure beats going to a career fair and throwing your resume into the pile, huh?

Students- get an internship or entry level job because of what you can do.  Not what you look like on your resume, not where you went to school, and not how much you can charm someone in an interview.  Companies- find better talent.  Identify those diamonds in the rough that you would have missed using your conventional tools. And do it in a new, exciting, and scalable way.

The future is here. Join a talent community!

Misspellings In Your Internship Cover Letter

Who cares if you misspell words on your internship cover letter? Normally people just don't care. I can't stand the people that preach about how to create such a perfect document. The internship cover letter is not the end goal. Creating a piece of paper, just doesn't matter. Connections matter more. 

Do not spend forever editing your internship cover letter. It just doesn't make sense for any student to do that. Time is valuable and better spent building relationships or creating something of value.

Also, college recruiters have to get over themselves. Seriously, it just doesn't matter how perfect you think you are, great innovators sometime make spelling mistakes. I would argue that they make more spelling mistakes than the average person because they are confident enough to not care about internship cover letter perfection. Instead, they care about doing things!

Don't waste your time or get rattled based on ruthless recruiters. 

Seth Godin: Cover Letter

This is from Seth' Godins Blog. Click here to read his blog (it's awesome).

What are you hiring for?

If you're trying to hire someone who presents well to strangers, creates documents without typos, is good at seeking out interesting new opportunities, can think on her feet in an interview and can network with strangers in search of a goal, your current hiring system is probably perfect.

Unfortunately, those skills don't apply to most jobs.

As a result, we end up hiring people who are good at self-marketing, not at what we need them to do.

It may very well be that this programmer or that cleaning person or this animator is absolutely terrible at the things that make it easy to get hired. Is there anything wrong with that? Isn't the entire point of a hiring process to separate the people who will be good at the job from those that won't? Why is "clever cover-letter writing" or "willingness to travel across town on spec for an interview" a leading indicator of that?

If you're trying to hire someone who presents well to strangers, creates documents without typos, is good at seeking out interesting new opportunities, can think on her feet in an interview and can network with strangers in search of a goal, your current hiring system is probably perfect.

Unfortunately, those skills don't apply to most jobs.

As a result, we end up hiring people who are good at self-marketing, not at what we need them to do.

It may very well be that this programmer or that cleaning person or this animator is absolutely terrible at the things that make it easy to get hired. Is there anything wrong with that? Isn't the entire point of a hiring process to separate the people who will be good at the job from those that won't? Why is "clever cover-letter writing" or "willingness to travel across town on spec for an interview" a leading indicator of that?

When To Sumbit Your Internship Cover Letter

When is the best time to submit your internship cover letter? Yes, you may have guessed it - when their is not an available internship! This is the best way to land an awesome internship. I know it seems like it doesn't make any sense - applying for an internship position that doesn't exist - but, let's take a look at my it is the best time to submit your internship cover letter!

The best time to sumbit your internship cover letter is when nobody else is applying! The reason is quite simple, you have the littlest competition. For an internship, a company may get well over a 100 internship resumes. I know that number sounds crazy, but it is true. Under Armour gets over 7,000 applications for 30 intern jobs. Yes - 7,000 applications for 30 intern jobs! I know that sounds crazy, but the internship competition is fierce - why compete when you don't have to.

This is something students don't quite understand. Students don't realize that companies think about interns year round, they just all go to hire at the same time. If you want to standout, don't do what everybody else is doing - submit your internship cover letter early and get the internship!

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For more internship information, go to internship cover letter, internship resume, and intern jobs. For specific resources, go to investment banking internships or marketing internships.

Internship Cover Letters

You are EQUAL to your employers (even in your internship cover letter)

Plenty of people e-mail us asking questions about small details in their internship cover letters.  In this post, I’m going to dig a little deeper and talk about the mindset from which you write an internship cover letter. 

In all of our posts, we do our fair share of bashing internship cover letter samples and stress that you need to be confident and be different.  We’ve been beating a dead horse by putting down the traditional “To whom it may concern” internship cover letter.  And I’m going to beat it some more by going to the root of the bad internship cover letter.

Bad internship cover letters start from the “no value” mindset from which most people write them.  When students are searching for internships, a lot of them think, “I will do anything to get this internship.”  They want an internship SO bad that they don’t care who gives it to them.  If you are in this mindset (consciously or subconsciously) when you are writing an internship cover letter, it will come across like you are BEGGING for an internship from the employer.  From an objective point of view, an internship cover letter like this looks desperate in the eyes of an employer (again, consciously or subconsciously).  You are putting the internship above you, and your internship cover letter is saying, “You, the employer, hold all of the value in this relationship.  I am only a college student.  Please give me an internship.”

The solution?  Treat your employers as equals in your internship cover letter.  Treat the cover letter like you are proposing a partnership.  Say to yourself before you write it, “The employees of this company are my equals.  I can do what they can do.”  Don’t be arrogant, but show your employer that you are confident and have something to offer.

If you do this, whoever is reading your internship cover letter will pick up on it see your value.  Don’t beg for internships anymore.  Enter the “my employers are my equals” mindset, and your internship cover letter will become a partnership proposal in which both parties offer value to each other.

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For more internship information, go to internship cover letter, internship resume, and intern jobs. For specific resources, go to investment banking internships or marketing internships.

When To Go With A Bland Internship Cover Letter

Many career advisers and employers give advice to applicants that they should get creative with their internship cover letter.  Companies receive an exorbitant amount of internship cover letters for every position, and if you want to stand a chance out there, you need to capture the attention of the person reading it by any means possible.  This isn’t exactly bad advice at all; it should be one of your main goals to stand out in the crowd.  However, if it’s a trade off between writing style and innovation that you’re going to make, don’t bother because you’ll be wasting your time.

Unless you can find a way to create a fusion of creativity, relevance, and good writing style in your internship cover letter, you may better off sticking with the basic template of a internship cover letter combined with excellent writing skills and a strong voice.  As each generation applies for jobs, words like “gonna” and “legit” resurface more and more frequently and put off the older generation considering them for a position.

While firms may receive hundreds of internship cover letters from all the applicants, you’d be surprised to see how few of them are actually solid writing samples devoid of grammatical and spelling errors.  Spend your time writing as frequently as possible in order to find your voice.  Once you’ve found a good means of writing your internship cover letter, have as many people as possible proofread it.  If you really want to stand out with your internship cover letter, do it right.  Don’t pretend to be an astronaut who paints portraits on the weekends.

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For more internship information, go to internship cover letter, internship resume, and intern jobs. For specific resources, go to investment banking internships or marketing internships.

Confidence vs Arrogance In Your Internship Cover Letter

Confidence/arrogance in your internship cover letter Today, I read an example of an internship cover letter on the GrouperEye.com blog. The internship cover letter was from the candidate to Wieden + Kennedy, who allegedly hired him on the spot. The letter was confident to say the least, and borderline arrogant.

The guy writing the internship cover letter said things like, “I have between 2-3 groundbreaking business or creative ideas every single day” and “…decided that If I were to ever become successful and impact the world greatly…” Yes, quotes these were actually in the internship cover letter. In my opinion, this is ridiculous and arrogant. But it worked. It worked so well that the candidate was immediately hired. It worked so well that the no one at W + K cared about how poorly it was written. It worked so well that everyone at W + K ignored the myriad of grammatical errors (which were so bad that I wasn’t even sure if the candidate could speak proper English.)

The point I’m making is that the line between confidence and arrogance in your internship cover letter is extremely blurry. So by all means, be confident in your internship cover letter. Flirt with arrogance, and pull back a little. You need to show employers that you are SURE about yourself and SURE that you can contribute to their team. This requires a great deal of confidence, and maybe a little arrogance.

This guy writing this internship cover letter was basically equating himself with Wieden + Kennedy, which is one of the best advertising agencies in the world. And they hired him. This candidate didn’t play by the rules in his internship cover letter. He didn’t write it in the same structure that your career center tells you. He didn’t play it safe. He told his own personal story. He took a gamble, and he won.

Do whatever it takes in your internship cover letter to let employers know that you are serious and offer value to the company. If you don’t include an example of success from your past because you think it may come across as arrogant, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Conversational Tone For Your Internship Cover Letter

I think students always forget that recruiters are not robots. So, they turn in this robotic internship cover letter that doesn't hit emotionally with recruiters. Students are missing a huge opportunity to connect with a recruiter on an emotional level - this is huge! Keeping a conversational ton for your internship cover letter allows you to differentiate yourself by being real and by connecting on an emotional letter.

It is so easy to through words like passion, creativity, drive, and commitment into your internship cover letter. Don't. Be real because real is different. Recruiters get hundreds, sometimes thousands of cover letters that talk about this exact same thing. Oh what, you have a passion for marketing and tremendous creativity? Guess what, so does 50,000 other students.

Write your internship cover letter like you would talk to your friend. Tell her a story about the funny time you launching a marketing program at school and how everybody laughed until the night of the show when they had to scramble to get more chairs for the event. Tell is like it is. Conversational tone in an internship cover letter shows confidence and recruiters want confidence.

Internship Cover Letter: How Long?

How long should your internship cover letter be? This is a question we get often and the answer is, as short as you can possibly make it. Remember, the goal of your internship cover letter and your internship resume is just one thing: get out of the pile and into the interview. The goal of these two tools, and yes, they are merely tools, is to get you to the interview. Let’s take a look at internship cover letter length.

Who reads your internship cover letter? It is probably a recruiter who reads a ton of internship cover letters all day long. So, the last thing she wants to do is sit there and spend 10 minutes reading your cover letter. But, don't forget, she is trying hard, very hard, to find the perfect intern for the summer - this is her job. If she lands an amazing intern, she looks good within the company.

Okay, you want an exact number: 200 words. But at the end of the internship cover letter, ask yourself this question: can I take anything else out of this document?

Internship Cover Letter - What's The Goal?

What is the goal of your cover letter? Why is it a letter? What do you want it to accomplish. The goal of an internship cover letter is to get an interview. That coupled with your internship resume are the tools to get you to the next step. If you want to get noticed, why on earth would you write what everyone else is writing? Why do people think that it works to have a form letter - that never works, ever.

If the goal is to get out of the pile and into the internship interview chair, then you need to standout. I fail to understand why anyone is risk averse with their internship cover letter - this should be one of the most high risk items you can hand an emplyer. There is no second place - you either win or you lose. No point in saving face or doing an average job. There is no "B+" - the class is pass fail.

In order to pass I would offer two quick pieces of advice: get specific and/or be different. Get specific - tell me exactly what you would do in the internship. How would you do it and what would you get done. Not high level, low level stuff. The second, be different. If you are not different, chance are you will not win. Different at least gets read. Different is bulletin board material.

Think about the goal: getting the internship interview. Then go about creating a tool that gets the goal. Nothing more or nothing less. Get it done and do awesome internship work!