What’s In A Name?

Pivoting to cover letter language for today, in the past couple of weeks I received cover letters addressed to “sir or madam” and another addressed to “to whom it may concern.” We’ll get to the use of those phrases in a moment, but keep in mind that my emails (where I received the letters) are CRAIG@sandsearch.com and CRAIG@legalresumereview.com (emphasis added).

Presumably if they typed my email address into the correspondence, they could have deduced my first name. If they wanted to be particularly formal, they could have gone to either website and found my last name to use “Mr. Sandok.”

Instead of impressing me with what was in the letters, I was left with the impression that they were either trying to be overly formal or they were just plain sloppy. Neither is ideal for the author.

Going back to the language at hand, I understand that these are relics of an older age when you couldn’t deduce the right person to send a resume to at a company. Those days are gone. “Sir/madam,” “to whom it may concern” and “Dear hiring manager” are all outdated.

Find a real human being on LinkedIn and use their name. Scour the job posting for clues about who might be the correct recipient. If it’s a law firm, find the Managing Partner or Director of Attorney Recruiting on their website. If it is a company, search to see who works in the human resources department. Even if you are wrong about them being the correct point of contact, you still have personalized the submission and made an attempt.

In my book, an attempt to personalize the correspondence is better than using outdated, generic terms. I think others note the effort, too. It’s like the baseball analogy – it’s better to go down swinging than being called out on strikes.