What is a cover letter? The cover letter is a letter that accompanies your job application and resume and serves as the first page of those documents. The purpose of a cover letter is to identify the specific job that you're seeking and to briefly describe your qualifications for that job. Maybe you wonder whether employers even look at cover letters. And in fact, they definitely do. Many employers read cover letters to see if they are even interested in looking at your resume more closely. Let's talk about the goals of a cover letter. When composing your cover letter, you should keep two important goals in mind. First, you want to convince the employer that they are interested in you as a candidate for the job. And secondly, you want the employer to be so interested in you that they want to bring you in for an interview. Let me talk about how to make a good cover letter. Good cover letters should specify the exact position that you are applying for and should go on to list the qualifications that make you so attractive to the employer that they are compelled to continue reading your letter. There's a number of job search related documents that should be collected into your Job Search Portfolio, and your cover letter is one of these documents. If you'd like to see samples of cover letters, we have them available for you online. You want to go to the PEPNet website, and once there, find the title Getting a Job video series. This will bring you to a link entitled Supporting Documents. You'll see a number of different documents, one entitled Cover Letters. You can download this sample to get an idea of what good cover letters look like.