Writing a cover letter can be a difficult task. You want to highlight your skills and experience without coming off conceited and you want to make sure that your letter stands out above the rest. Depending on your industry and level of experience, you want to tailor your cover letter for each prospective business you are applying to.
While substance is a crucial aspect of having a winning cover letter, you also want it to be visually appealing. You should brand both your cover letter and resume so that they look similar, and the style of the layout should reflect your industry and personality. For example, if you are a professional looking for a technical job, both your cover letter and resume should be crisp and to the point. If you are applying to a job in an artistic industry like graphic design or photography, your cover letter should be more unique and show off your design skills. Take this graphic designer’s cover letter for example.
Here are 5 websites that provide awesome free cover letter templates.
1. LiveCareer Cover Letter Builder
If you want to control aspects of design in your cover letter but don’t want to go through the hassle or process of actually building your own format, LiveCareer is a great resource to use.
It will guide you step-by-step and formats a resume to your desired style. On the right-hand side you have options for how you want your cover letter to be styled, and you can edit and manipulate certain fields. LiveCareer even goes a step further and provides you with key phrases that you can use while writing your letter, like presets for the opening paragraph such as, “The attached resume details my extensive experience and training” or “I believe I possess the necessary skills and experience you are seeking and would make a valuable addition to your company.” If you have little to no experience to writing a cover letter, I highly suggest using this website.
2. Microsoft Office Free Cover Letter Templates
If editing inside of Word is your thing, then Microsoft offers great templates to get you started on that cover letter. On this site they provide resources to build both a resume and a cover letter. You can simply download the files and if you have Windows, open up Word from whatever template you like best.
This gives you more control than LiveCareer as you can edit freely within Microsoft Word. If you like having full control over margins and fonts, use Microsoft’s free templates.
3. Susan Ireland’s Resume Site
Learning from the best often brings success. Susan Ireland’s Resume Site will not only provide you with 50 great, ready-to-use cover letter templates but will give you guidance if you’re not sure where to start on writing one. She has a ton of tutorials with matching cover letter templates for different industries, as well as samples for career changes and samples for recent college graduates.
Do you want to learn to the intricate differences between getting referred to a job and finding a position on a job board? How about answering a job ad in the newspaper? If you’ve ever asked yourself these questions, then Ireland’s site is one to use.
4. DayJob.com Cover Letter Templates
How about editing in Adobe you ask? DayJob.com offers a bunch of different samples that you can use in Adobe Acrobat. If you are looking for pre-written letters and examples, where you can just plug in your name and information, DayJob.com is also a great resource.
On the bottom of the page, they also have links for Cover Letter templates you can download as a Word doc, just in case you don’t have full access to Adobe Acrobat.
5. Resumizer Free Cover Letter Creator
Resumizer has a great cover letter tool that is very similar to LiveCareer. While the interface looks outdated, it still does a great job at configuring that pesky letter in a visually appealing format. It will prompt you to put in applicable information and then will generate a cover letter to the style that you chose.
While it isn’t the fanciest tool in the shed, it certainly gets the job done if you are looking to automate your cover letter creation.
Cover letters become more important as you advance in your career. The more you evolve as a professional, the more companies will expect you to be able to write a clear, concise, and aesthetically pleasing cover letter. By having a great template and style sheet ready to go, you are avoiding common pitfalls that could be made by going it alone.
