QA job market is definitely becoming more and more crowded so you might be tempted to window shop for jobs and gauge at your market value. You may be excited about getting a software tester job but the very thought of writing your cover letter and resume, revealing all of your personal and professional data dampens that feeling.
Cover letter, being one of the most important elements of your software tester job application, needs to be tailored to the job advertisement. It is a huge investment of time and effort to create a different cover letter for each job you apply to, but it’s an investment worth making. You can also make this tailoring more marginal than total by simply adding keywords from your job ad to your template and mentioning something specific about the company and the job. So, the majority of your letter could be a template that you’ve created for all of the jobs but changed for that specific job in details. Here is a seven-step process that can help you write a cover letter that will impress any recruiter:
Organise your Cover Letter
“The cover letter namely shows your business writing skills. You should make sure that it’s written with impeccable style that would match most business cultures if you want to use it as a template. Make sure that you have added all of the important elements like your name and address, your recipient’s name, title, company and address. You also need the date, a proper greeting, your cover letter body, closing salutations and your name again. This is a clear and simple template which you can use in multiple occasions,” says Kira Wu, a recruiter at Let’s go and learn and Top Canadian Writers.
Writing Paragraph One – 4 Important Details
Your cover letter opening paragraph should contain four important elements.
- Introduce yourself politely
- State what position you are applying for by using the exact same words used in the job ad
- State how you heard about that position and say if someone referred you.
- Create a transition statement which summarises why the recruiter of employer should be interested.
Create a Hook
Before you reach the key parts of your cover letter, you should make sure that the first area, where you introduce yourself is the area you’ll most likely change a lot. If you are applying for a job where your education matters the most, you should open with that. If you need expertise or experience, lead with that. If you have discovered a shared interest with the person that will read your cover letter, open with that. This is the area that will change each time you send your letter to a new company so you should make it flexible and reread it several times to make sure that your text applies to the company.
Paragraph 2 and 3 – Best Arguments
The second and third paragraph of your cover letter are there for you to list your best arguments. This is where you build your case. Here are three structures that might work best for you:
- Inside and outside – you should focus the second paragraph on your experience and what you did inside your workplace recent jobs or projects you worked on and the third paragraph on your academic experience and things you did outside of the workplace.
- Hard and soft – Dedicate your second paragraph to your hard skills and your second paragraph to your soft skills
- Contrast – If you have two projects or positions where you achieved great results, you can use this to show that you can do an equally amazing job in two places.
Add Specific Details to Support Your Arguments
Specific details like numbers and percentages make your argument even stronger and better. Make sure that you include these.
The Closing – 3 Important Parts
Your closing needs to have these three important parts:
- Summarise why they need to hire you
- Thank the employer
- End with a CTA
Use Online formatting and Editing Tools
While your cover letter needs to be written in a professional and compelling manner, including all of the details of what you do and how you can contribute, one of the parts that often gets overlooked is spelling and grammar. You write your cover letter, it’s good, you are excited and you send it without checking. Then you open it later only to see that you have made numerous spelling and grammar mistakes and that it’s basically just a block of text.
Avoid making these mistakes by carefully re-reading your cover letter and using tools to help you write.
Writing the perfect cover letter is a bit difficult but if you create a template by following these steps, you can rest assured that you have something compelling and high quality to send to your recruiters.
