How to Make a Letter of Intent for Employment

Video Transcript

"Cover letters or letters of intent are important application documents that students use and basically what we do is we train students on how to open the letter, how to build the body of the letter and how to close the letter. The opening of a cover letter is always something that is going to be very specific. One of the things that we talk about in the Career Center is focus in terms of writing resumes and writing cover letters. Recruiters are very savvy in seeing when a letter has been created for multiples of employers and blasted out on the Internet so the kind of cookie cutter cover letter and resume, it stands out in a bad way and so we want to make certain that students are really focused when they're writing their resumes and cover letters. So for example in the opening of a cover letter may be explaining to the employer how you found out about the position you are applying to, where you found the position that you are applying to and then the middle part of the document is going to be kind of getting to the point in terms of what you bring to the table, what accomplishments, what experiences are going to matter to that particular recruiter and we always want to make sure that we are writing relevant statements that are going to be meaningful to the recruiter. A close of a cover letter the best way to do it is we are closing in a very proactive way in terms of telling the recruiter what you're going to do next so it's no longer I'm going to wait for you to call me. I am actually going to tell you I am going to call you so I will be calling you the week of May 1st to follow up on this communication. The interesting thing is students really don't think that they're allowed "allowed" to pick up the phone and talk to a human being about their application so we, one of the things I do is really building confidence in terms of how that verbal communication is going to come out."