Cover Letter Examples That Don't Start With 'I Am Writing to Apply'

"I am writing to apply for the position of [job title] as advertised on [website]."

That sentence appears on a staggering share of cover letters, and it does exactly one thing: it tells a hiring manager that you have read other cover letters. It contains no information. They know you are applying — your application is the reason they are reading. You have spent your first and most valuable line restating the envelope.

This post is a set of examples you can actually adapt. If you want the full theory — whether you even need a cover letter, the anatomy, the length rules — we covered that in how to write a cover letter that gets read. What follows is the practical half: complete letters for the situations people actually find themselves in, and a pile of opening lines that beat the standard one.

The structure these examples follow

Every letter below runs on the same four beats. Once you see it, you can build your own without a template:

1. A first line that could only be about this job. Specific, human, no throat-clearing.
2. Proof you can do the work. One concrete accomplishment with a number, chosen because it maps to their problem.
3. Why them specifically. Evidence you understand the company or role, not flattery.
4. A clean close. What you want to happen next, in one sentence, without begging.

Three to four short paragraphs. Under 300 words. Nobody has ever complained that a cover letter was too short.

Example 1: The standard application

You are qualified, you found the posting normally, and you have relevant experience. This is the most common case and the one people overthink.

Dear Priya,

Your posting mentions that the support team is handling 40% more tickets than last year with the same headcount. I spent 2024 on the other side of exactly that problem — my team at Northwind absorbed a 60% ticket increase after a product launch, and we got average handle time down from 14 minutes to 9 by rebuilding the macro library and killing three escalation paths nobody used.

I have five years in B2B SaaS support, the last two leading a team of six on Zendesk. I care most about the unglamorous parts: documentation that stays current, onboarding that does not rely on shadowing, and turning ticket patterns into product feedback that engineering will actually read.

Sightline's decision to keep support in-house while everyone else outsources is the reason I applied. I would like to talk about what the next year of that looks like.

Best, Marcus Chen

Notice what it does not do: no "I am writing to apply," no listing of adjectives, no summary of the resume that is already attached. It names their problem in the first line and answers it in the second.

Example 2: Career changer

The trap here is apologizing. Do not explain what you lack; explain what transfers, and be concrete about the retraining so it does not read as a whim.

Dear Hiring Team,

I spent seven years as a restaurant general manager, which means I have run a P&L, hired and lost staff in a brutal labor market, and made pricing decisions with incomplete data every single week. I am now applying those same instincts as an operations analyst, and I would like to do it at Verra.

Over the past 18 months I completed the Google Data Analytics certificate and took on freelance work for two hospitality groups — building the inventory forecasting model that cut one client's food waste by 22%, and a labor-scheduling dashboard that a 40-person restaurant still runs on today. The tools were new. The questions were not.

Your job posting emphasizes translating messy operational data for non-technical stakeholders. That has effectively been my job for a decade, just without the word "analyst" on my business card.

I would welcome the chance to walk you through the forecasting model.

Thank you, Dana Whitfield

The full framing playbook for a pivot lives in the career change resume guide.

Example 3: Little or no experience

New grads write the weakest cover letters because they think they have nothing to say. You do — it is just not employment.

Dear Mr. Alvarez,

I built a tool that scrapes my university's course catalog and alerts students when a full class opens up. About 900 people used it last semester, and keeping it running through registration week taught me more about error handling and rate limits than any course I took.

I am graduating in May with a computer science degree and two internships behind me: one writing internal tooling in Python at a logistics startup, one doing careful, slow work on a bank's legacy system. Both were useful, for opposite reasons. I am strongest in backend work — Python, PostgreSQL, and making slow endpoints fast.

I am applying to Harbor specifically because your engineering blog documents outages honestly, which suggests a culture where a junior engineer can ask a dumb question without paying for it.

I would be glad to talk any time.

Sincerely, Amara Osei

More on building the rest of the application with a thin history: how to write a resume with no experience.

Example 4: You have a referral

If someone inside the company pointed you here, that goes in the first line. It is the strongest signal you have, and burying it in paragraph three is a waste.

Dear Sam,

Rachel Ibarra on your design team suggested I get in touch — we worked together at Kestrel, where I redesigned the onboarding flow she has probably complained to you about inheriting.

That project is the short version of what I do: I took a five-step signup with a 34% completion rate and got it to 61% over two quarters, mostly by removing things. Before that I spent three years at an agency, which is where I learned to defend design decisions to people who did not like them.

Rachel mentioned the team is rethinking the activation experience this year. That is the part of the job I would most want to work on.

Best, Tomás Reyes

Example 5: Cold outreach, no posting

No job advertised. Your letter has to justify its own existence, so lead with something useful to them rather than something you want.

Dear Ms. Okonjo,

You do not have a content role posted, so I will be brief and specific.

I read your last three quarterly updates and noticed Bright Lane publishes almost nothing between product launches. That is a gap I fix: at Corebridge I built an editorial program from zero to 210,000 monthly sessions in two years, and roughly 40% of trial signups now touch a blog post first.

If a content hire is anywhere on your roadmap for this year, I would like to be an early conversation. If it is not, I am happy to send over the three-post outline I sketched for you regardless — no strings.

Regards, Nia Fitzgerald

Twelve openings that beat "I am writing to apply"

Steal the shape, fill in your own specifics:

1. "Your posting mentions [their exact problem]. I spent last year fixing that at [company]."
2. "[Name] on your team suggested I reach out."
3. "I have [specific number] of [relevant thing], and I want to bring it to [company]."
4. "I built [thing] that [result]. I would like to do that here."
5. "The line in your job description about [detail] is why I applied."
6. "I have been a [company] customer since [year], which is how I noticed [specific observation]."
7. "Most [role] applicants will tell you they are detail-oriented. Here is a number instead: [metric]."
8. "I spent seven years in [old field]. Here is why that makes me better at [new field], not worse."
9. "You do not have this role posted. I am writing anyway, and here is why it may be worth ten minutes."
10. "I read your engineering blog post about [topic] and disagreed with one part. That is meant as a compliment."
11. "Three things I would do in my first 90 days on this team: [brief list]."
12. "I am the person who [distinctive, true, relevant fact about you]."

Every one of these is specific enough that a different applicant could not paste it into their own letter. That is the only test that matters.

What gets cover letters deleted

The mirror-resume. If your letter restates your resume in paragraph form, it adds nothing and costs the reader two minutes. The letter exists to say what the resume cannot: judgment, motivation, and fit.

"To Whom It May Concern." Spend ninety seconds finding a name on LinkedIn or the company site. If you genuinely cannot, "Dear Hiring Team" is fine. The concern-based salutation reads as a mail merge.

Adjective piles. "Passionate, driven, detail-oriented self-starter." Our data has these on 37 to 48% of resumes, and the rate on cover letters is no better. They are claims anyone can make.

Writing about what you want. "This role would be a great opportunity for my growth." Possibly true, entirely irrelevant to the person reading. Their question is what you do for them.

Unedited AI output. Not because AI is disqualifying, but because the default output is stuffed with the exact phrases that trigger a skim — we broke down the tells in can recruiters tell if AI wrote your resume. Use it for a draft, then cut the buzzwords and put your voice back.

Length. If it fills a page, it is too long. Three or four short paragraphs is the whole job.

“Delete the first sentence of your cover letter. Don't rewrite it — delete it. About 80% of the time, the second sentence was the real opening, and the letter gets better instantly.”

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Before you send it

Read it out loud and ask two questions. Could another applicant for this job have written this letter word for word? And does the first line say anything a hiring manager did not already know?

If the answers are yes and no, the letter is not finished, and the fix is almost always the same: replace a generality with a specific, and cut the opening.

When you want an outside read, our free cover letter roast does exactly that: it counts every "I am writing to apply for," flags every "passionate," and tells you which paragraphs are doing real work. No signup, about 30 seconds. It is harsher than your friends and more useful than a template.