Emails Versus Cover Letters

You’re getting ready to email your resume and cover letter to a potential employer or recruiter, but you’re not sure if you should attach your cover letter or incorporate it within the body of your email. What should you do? Well, clearly you are most likely not going to send your resume and cover letter in the mail, but if you did, you may choose to incorporate a small note with a warm introduction inside your envelope. The same applies to emailing your resume and cover letter. The note you may have placed in the envelope containing your resume and cover letter is equivalent to the body of an email containing your attached resume and cover letter. Just think about the body of your email as a place to have a warm, professional, and friendly message, creating a relationship with the reader. Ensure your message is brief and to the point, avoiding marketing tactics and attempting to sell yourself – this is what the actual cover letter is for. You want to whet the appetite of your reader so they will happily “click” with interest, to open your attached resume.

Here is a good example of an email introduction:

Another thing to consider is that even though we live in a world that strives to become paperless, some recruiters and hiring managers prefer to print candidate resumes and cover letters to keep for their records, forward onto a hiring manager, or make hand-written notes on. This is not as easily done or presentable when printed directly from an email message.

As you may have noticed with the above example, the message is brief and to the point, but warmer to the reader than if a cover letter was copied and pasted into the body of the message.  Ensure as you keep the message/introduction brief that your grammar and spelling is correct, your word choice is appropriate, and your tone is professional.