How I Made My Cover Letter Stand Out

Fresh out of journalism school, I remembered this nugget of wisdom our creative writing professor shared with us concerning job hunting: “If you want to be hired, show off your creativity! Don’t do what everyone else is doing, be different.”

That really stuck with me as I was preparing myself for my job hunt. Sure, we all know we need the standard resume and cover letter to at least score a job interview. But I wanted more – I wanted to stand out even before I went for the job interview at the dream company.

And so, I decided to take that advice and run with it. Instead of your usual Times New Roman 12 point cover letter, I had designed my cover letter to look like a Wanted poster. With a huge headline that said “Wanted: To Write For The Best Magazine in Town!” Yes, I was that bold, but it got the attention I was looking for. The rest of the cover letter highlighted why I wanted the job and why I was the right person but written in a very tongue-in-cheek manner. After all, I was after a writing job so why not showcase my writing skills right from the start?

Well, it worked. I was called for an interview and got the job on the spot. In fact, there wasn’t even an opening, but the editor wanted to meet the person behind the cover letter and like they say, the rest is history.

If you’ve been feeling demoralised lately about your job hunt, you may want to consider a different approach to it. Looking through job posts, reformatting your resume, sending follow-up emails can take a toll on the entire process so why not make it fun to your advantage? This is particularly useful if you want to showcase a skill. Sure, you can talk all about the skill you have and how it will come in handy for the new position but what better way to sell yourself than to actually show it off?

Take this job seeker for example: Robby Leonardi took several months to build his interactive video game CV. You read that right, an interactive CV. Aside from it being super fun and creative, the end result of that resume showcased Leonardi’s skills in game design, programming and coding – all in a very engaging and stimulating CV. Check it out here and tell us what you think! We’re willing to bet he got a lot of calls after sending out his CV!

Or you can even build a website for your resume! With people having less time to go through pages and pages of a resume, having something convenient and online could be the way to go. Like Philippe Dubost who replicated an Amazon product page that featured his past experiences and skills as well as reviews – creative and memorable for sure! This definitely worked in Philippe’s favour as he was looking for a job as a web product manager. If you too are looking for something similar and want a different approach to being noticed by potential employers, let your creative juices flow!

Here’s something that’s super bold. I'm impressed it even worked: Alex Brownstein bought ad space on Google to get his online resume into the right hands. He was hoping that when the ad execs he wanted to work with Googled themselves, they would then see the first search result: His online resume! Now, how cool is that? His Google Job Experiment video explains what he did and the best part? It only cost him USD$6 to get the job of his dream.

And closer to home… Remember the Grab driver who attached his resume to his car headrest? Well, he sure got noticed when a passenger snapped a picture of his resume and sent it to a recruiter. His tweet about the incident went super viral, gathering over 1.6 million views. That’s one way to get the word out about your job hunt!

If you’ve been feeling blah lately about your job hunt experience, maybe these ideas may serve as inspiration! Or if you’ve been super creative with your own resume, tell us all about it @Graduan.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash.