Internship Cover Letter

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?