Cover letter format, and a template you can copy

A cover letter has four paragraphs and a hard ceiling of about 250 words. Here is the structure as text — copy it, paste it into Word, Google Docs or the box on the application form, and replace every line.

[Your name]
[City] · [phone] · [email]

[Date]

Dear [name, if you can find it — otherwise "Dear Hiring Manager"],

PARAGRAPH 1 — one or two sentences.
Which role, and the single strongest reason you can do it.
No preamble. Do not say you are writing to express interest.

PARAGRAPH 2 — three or four sentences.
One thing you did, with what changed because of it.
Small, checkable numbers. Something that was hard, and why.

PARAGRAPH 3 — two or three sentences.
Something specific about THIS employer, from the posting or their
product, and what you would do about it.
If this paragraph works for another company, it is not finished.

PARAGRAPH 4 — one sentence.
An offer to talk. No "I look forward to hearing from you at your
earliest convenience."

[Your name]

Four finished letters written to that skeleton — standard application, career change, internship, and a 90-word version for a form box — are on cover letter examples.

What each paragraph is actually for

• One: orient the reader. They are holding a stack. Name the role and give them one reason to read paragraph two. The opening line is the only part of the letter you can be sure gets read.
• Two: evidence. One story, not a summary of your career — the resume already does the summary. Pick the thing nearest to what this job needs and say what changed because you did it.
• Three: this employer. The paragraph that decides whether the letter was worth sending. It needs a fact you could only have got by looking at them, and a sentence about what you would do with it.
• Four: get out. One line. Every additional sentence here is throat-clearing.

The formatting, which matters less than you think

A cover letter is usually read by a person, and increasingly it is not a document at all — it is a text box on a form or the body of an email. So the layout rules are short:

• Same font and header as your resume if you are sending a document. The two arriving as a matched pair is the entire design brief.
• One page, and nowhere near filling it. Half a page of text is normal and correct.
• Left-aligned, not justified. Justified text in a short letter opens rivers of white space between words.
• Send it as PDF if you attach it, for the same reason as the resume — PDF or Word covers the actual difference.
• Paste it as plain text when the form asks for that, and re-read the paste. Curly quotes and em dashes usually survive; bullet characters and any indentation usually do not.

Addressing it when you cannot find a name

Spend two minutes looking — the posting, the company’s team page, LinkedIn for the job title that would manage this role. If you find it, use it. If you do not:

• Use “Dear Hiring Manager” or “Dear [Team name] Team”. Both are fine and neither is held against you.
• Do not use “To Whom It May Concern”, which reads as a form letter, or “Dear Sir/Madam”, which reads as 1994.
• Do not guess a name. Addressing it to someone who left the company is worse than not addressing it to anyone.

Why this is text rather than a .docx

Same reason as the fresher resume template: a downloaded cover letter template arrives with the sentences already written, and those sentences are the problem. “I am writing to express my keen interest in the position advertised” is in every free template and it is the line that makes a reader stop reading. A skeleton gives you the structure and none of the filler.

Microsoft and Google both have free cover letter templates in their template galleries if you want a formatted document, no email required. Take the layout and delete the prose.

Before you write one at all

Most applications do not need a cover letter, and a generic one actively costs you. Do you still need a cover letter has the five situations where the answer is decisively yes — career change being the big one. If your situation is not on that list and you have nothing specific to put in paragraph three, the honest advice is to spend the time on the resume instead.

Which is what this site is for, and where its interest lies: we build resumes and we do not build cover letters — no generator, nothing to buy on this page. The free checker works on a PDF you already have, with no account.