Creating a Cover Letter: The Power of a Persona

In a recent blog, we discussed how to structure your cover letter. Beyond these organizational conventions, though, an effective cover letter — for any position — gives you a unique opportunity to create a workplace persona.

In other words, it lets you make a deliberate choice about how you’ll present yourself.

Think of developing a persona as akin to making a choice about fashion; when you pick out clothes, you decide how you’ll present yourself. Are you going to dress professionally? Like an athlete? Like you’re going clubbing? Are you going to seem playful? Bold? Conservative? Will you play up your association with a particular culture or organization (through a University sweatshirt, for example)? Each choice communicates who you are.

Similarly, your cover letter, and its persona, indicates your identity as an employee.

Why is a Persona Important on Your Cover Letter?

Your first impression is crucial to the hiring process. Should you secure an interview, hiring managers won’t look at you as a blank slate employee — they’ll scale their in-person perceptions against the impression they’ve inferred from your resume and cover letter. In other words, most hiring managers approach the interview with some idea about what they expect to see from individual applicants — so make sure that you show them the proper things.

Creating a persona is especially important for career changers who might need to conclusively demonstrate why any potentially irrelevant information on their resumes could actually be beneficial to a company.

Similarly, an effective persona demonstrates you as a culture fit. With increasingly large pools of talent, many hiring managers — rightly or wrongly, intentionally or unintentionally — increasingly emphasize culture fit when selecting employees. Humans are tribal creatures, with a natural inclination towards those who fit in with the group — people who seem “like us.”

Before you recoil, recognize that this is not quite as sinister as it may initially seem. Every manager has horror stories about how a new employee unpleasantly shifted the nature of a department, for example, whether through laziness, complaining, or hostility towards co-workers. Emphasizing “culture-fit” is an attempt to avoid such personnel setbacks.

How Do You Create a Persona?

The first step is to fashion yourself as someone whose background meshes with the position. If the job asks you to train others, for example, emphasize times you’ve done this, in whatever capacity. If you’ll be a working member of a group, point out your teamwork contributions or conflict resolution skills. If the target company stresses innovation, talk about times you’ve contributed new ideas or products. It’s similar to the kind of audience-centered emphasis you use on a resume.

Beyond dictating how you select content, a good persona helps establish your attitude as an employee. In general, you want to seem confident but not conceited; eager but not desperate; secure in your abilities, but willing to contribute to a group. Remember, there are probably lots of people out there who can do what you do, in terms of straightforward abilities. Your task when writing a cover letter is to showcase yourself as someone people would want to work with.

Finally, make sure that your persona matches the persona of your target company. Examine how the company presents itself, and assess its reputation in the industry. If your target company stresses seriousness and efficiency, use a brisk, no-nonsense approach. On the other hand, if your target company highlights themselves as a “fun” place to work (as, for example, Trainsignal does) you have liberty to discuss your office social life—how you participated in planning birthday parties or charity events, for example. Remember: the goal is to show yourself as a good fit.

Undesirable Persona Choices

Some choices, naturally, might be less desirable. A cover letter stressing what you’ll get out of a position (i.e. how it will benefit your career) can unintentionally build a self-centered persona. Similarly, talking about what you won’t do can make you seem close-minded. Not communicating anything precise about the company you’re applying for can indicate you’re unwilling to do research, and making too much of a willingness to learn or fit in can seem desperate.

A persona, by the way, is also communicated through the writing decisions themselves, on a sentence level. A cover letter with poor connection between paragraphs and sentences, for example, evokes similarly cluttered work habits or organizational skills. A typo or two conveys poor attention to detail—and remember that in programming especially a misplaced digit or character can yield catastrophic consequences.

You would probably never mean to communicate any of these things, of course—but once they’re on the page whether you meant to communicate them is irrelevant. So tread carefully.

What to Do About It

Be deliberate about how you come across in your cover letter. Then, show the letter to someone whose opinion you trust and ask them to critique it. Don’t just ask them to proofread—though they can and should, of course. Ask them to evaluate what personality or work habits the letter reveals.
What kind of employee, in other words, would write a letter like this?

As a final note, don’t confuse creating a persona with lying. You shouldn’t make things up—both because it’s dishonest and because you’ll get caught. As mentioned initially, think of creating a persona like making a fashion decision. When you interview, you’ll dress appropriately. Hopefully, you’ll give crafting a persona equal consideration when writing.

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