How to write a cover letter for the U.S. job market?

A grad student in Europe writes:

Now that I'm sitting down to put together some applications for philosophy job positions, it occurs to me that I don't know how to write a cover letter for the American job market. For example, for PhD positions it was natural to state the people I'd like to work with. But now that I have a PhD, is this still the norm? Because while I really would like to work with, and learn from, AAA and YYY, since I'm applying for a tenure track position, aren't I supposed to be something approximating to a finished article - ready to stand on my own and complement my colleagues? In this case, would it not be better just to state why my research would complement the research profile of the department? And if so, would I benefit or harm my case by observing that my research would fill a gap in the department's teaching profile? What would be the right combination of flattery and self-confidence?

Thoughts from readers?

Comments

[Michael Kremer]

This question raises for me another one, which is somewhat tangential but not unrelated (its answer would say something about how to answer the candidate's real question): how many department search committees take these cover letters all that seriously? I used to think something like this: in other fields the cover letters are treated as really important, and need to be individually written for different departments (this was my wife's experience when applying to positions in history), but in philosophy we don't pay that much attention to them (this reflected my own experience long ago in applying to positions in philosophy, but also my practice in reading job applications -- I generally skip the cover letter and go straight to the CV, the dissertation abstract or research statement, and the letters of reference, and then the writing sample -- my justification being that any long cover letter is likely to be a misleading sales pitch by the candidate -- *precisely* an attempt at "the right combination of flattery and self-confidence" -- and so not really valuable information).

The relevance of my question to the candidate's question is pretty clear: if what I used to think is correct, he or she should not be putting a lot of effort into the cover letters.

But it seems that my old view may well not be right. I'd be curious to know what others on the hiring end think of cover letters, whether they really play much of a role in hiring decisions, etc.

(I can imagine more complex versions of my question -- do cover letters matter less, as I suspect, at research universities than at teaching colleges -- or more -- for example. But I will keep it simple for now.)

[John Schwenkler]

Michael: At my institution (a mission-driven SLAC) we care about cover letters *a lot*. (Some of my colleagues will not even consider applications that don't have them.) I used to think that this was true only of institutions "like mine", but some recent things I've read -- posts by Mohan Matthen at NewApps, perhaps? -- have convinced me that this is not so: it is always better to have a substantial cover letter than not, if only to be safe.

[David Wallace]

On the (smallish number of) Oxford hiring committees I've served on, the cover letter was pretty much completely irrelevant.

[Michael Kremer]

Having raised my first question, I'll just say this about the candidate's real question: he or she is right that this isn't like applying to grad school. Then, you were applying to be educated by a group of scholars and teachers. Now, you're applying to join such a group of scholars and educators. If you are going to write a detailed cover letter, explain how you will contribute to the mission of the department, show that you have some sense of what that mission is and why the department needs someone like you to complete or forward that mission. You can talk about how you would like to work with A B or C, but put this in terms of how your work will complement that of others in the department, and how it will benefit from collaboration with them. Show a sense of the kind of school you're applying to -- not all are primarily interested in your research profile. Putting it in terms of how your research will fill gaps in a department's teaching profile will not work at a school with 4 members in the department; you need to be able to teach well outside your research profile for such a school. You can talk about how your general approach to teaching will work with their students, for example. If you have teaching experience to draw on you can highlight that, for a place that is more teaching than research focused.

[Michael Kremer]

John: Thanks, I thought something like this might be true -- and it is worth knowing. But then it would also be worth knowing what you're looking for in a cover letter, that you couldn't get from other materials in the candidate's application.

[Rebecca Kukla]

Yeah this seems to be a culture change, I guess. Michael, when you and (then) I were at Pitt, we were told that our cover letters should be two sentences: "I am applying for JFP position #x. I will be at the APA and can be reached at y." I passed on that advice for years, but it has become clear that cover letters have gotten more elaborate and expectations of them have grown. I think this is pretty much stupid - Occasionally there may be some special reason why you are especially well-suited to a job, of a sort that wouldn't naturally go on a cv, and you might want to call attention to it in the letter. But typically the new, more elaborate letters contain some combination of information already in the c.v. and annoying puffery. And I can't really imagine what alternatives there are. But I've become convinced that job marketeers now do have to do a more 'serious' cover letter, because it is expected.

[Michael Kremer]

My colleague Ben Laurence pointed me to some of the comments on this earlier thread --

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2011/10/departmental-placement-officer-seeks-advice.html#comments

including his comment -- as relevant to the question I asked. I must have been napping...

So it seems clear that cover letters are important at some institutions, at least.

[doris]

My experience is similar to Michael's: I wrote (mostly) very short cover letters, and pay them very little mind in reviewing applications, on the grounds that letters are constrained performances and relatively unlikely to reveal meaningful projective information. (If inclined, supply your own comparison to APA interviews here.)

But if one reviews the previous thread, "Departmental Placement Officer Seeks Advice," it is obvious that some people doing hiring care *a lot* about cover letters: it therefore seems prudent for candidates to care about them too, and engaging in appropriate tailoring is therfore reasonable. This won't hurt you with anyone -- those with views like Michael and I won't hold what they read against you, if they read it -- and it may very well help you with many people.

The problem is time. If things haven't changed since I was on the market job market, candidates are busy, and tailoring is time consumptive: tailoring 50-100 letters might take as much time as writing a decent draft of a paper.

The obvious advice is to triage your tailoring. One heuristic is that research institutions care less about the cover letter, but this may be (like all heuristics) a little coarse.

I'd suggest: write a generic letter that treats both research and teaching, and is long enough to not risk insulting those who might be insulted by perceived cursoriness (1-1.5 pp. ?). Then, tailor pretty selectively, where 1. There's reason to think the institution has retention anxiety ("While the homicide rate in St. Louis is off putting, I just love those plucky Cardinals.") or 2. You are an *especially* good fit ("I'm delighted to see you have an AOC in Philosophy of Baseball; I was a minor league utility infielder for three seasons.") I'd be pretty selective about this selection, and not stretch too much: my cover letter to an appealing SLAC arguing for fit on the grounds my sister went there did not, sad to say, take me very far.

Summary: enough people care about cover letters to make it worth putting in some time, but efforts here need to be balanced with efforts elsewhere, like producing a writing sample that is a masterpiece of fluidity and concision. So spend a bit of time -- perhaps over a beer at the end of a long day of writing -- but time appropriate to what is not (I conjecture) the most important part of your file at most places.

Very best of luck to job seekers.

[Anonymous job seeker]

The simple fact of the matter is that the hiring process is so variegated that nobody has any real idea how it happens outside their own local experience.

What would be *really* useful to job seekers and search committees alike is a compendium of best practices. This would outline profession-wide norms and expectations, against which individual institutions and applicants could then note differences. Everything from what goes into a dossier to timelines and procedures. The short notices in the back of the JFP are as insufficient as they are ignored.

The APA should take the lead, of course, but since that isn't going to happen, perhaps Leiter, Phylo, or the PhilPapers folks could set up a wiki in which the general consensus could be hammered out in group discussion.

[Bill Blattner]

Having served on a fair number of hiring committees over the years, I think Doris, above, hits the nail on the head. Cases that call for specially sculpted cover letters are places with an unusual or narrow job description, places with an announced special mission, or places that ask in their ad for a rationale for applying for a job in this location (say, and overseas branch of a university) or with this AOS/AOC combination.

Whatever you do, don't overdo it. Doris's example of St. Louis was a joke, but be aware that if a Dept. gets a whiff of condescension or a low opinion of their geographical location, they will likely dispense with your file on the spot.

[Patricia Marino]

I read cover letters from job applicants with interest; though I don't think of them as an explicit factor in decisions, I find an informative cover letter helpful to me in reading the overall file.

FWIW, things I learn from the cover letter that I don't often learn from other materials include: how the applicant explains her or his research project briefly to a non-specialist reader, how the applicant sees the significance and place of that research with respect to our advertised areas, and, in some cases, how the applicant sees their seemingly diverse research topics (such as epistemology and ethics, say) fitting together as part of an attempt to understand a bigger philosophical question.

So with respect to the original question posed by the grad student, I'd say to include a paragraph about how you see your research: what the question/topic is you're working on, what the significance is of your contribution to that question/topic, all explained to a reader who is not in your area. (I'd also include a paragraph about teaching, though personally I learn less from that specially.)

[John Schwenkler]

Michael: I agree that the practice of refusing to consider applications without a cover letter is very, very foolish. But here are some of the arguments my colleagues would give for it:

1. We want to make sure that people we take the trouble to interview are genuinely, enthusiastically supportive of the mission of the institution.
2. We want to make sure that these people are not just planning to leave us for the first "better" job that comes along.
3. We want to hire people who are a good "fit" (whatever this means, but it does mean something).

Of course, as John Doris says above, and as I know all of you are thinking, it is just too easy to fake all of this stuff. And I agree! But I think there is a general sense that an applicant's not even having *tried* to say some things about what attracts him or her to this position, or showing any evidence that he or she has actually taken the time to figure out what we're about, is a bad indicator. I don't think that this should be read as outright disqualifying, though.

P.S. One more point, related to the desire for a rundown of best practices: I just checked to confirm, and yep, when I applied for this job the JFP ad said no more than that "a letter of application" should be included -- i.e. there was nothing there to imply that it should be non-generic. This means that I dodged a bullet, because at Berkeley the standard advice was to do just what Rebecca describes above, and the only reason I was advised to do anything different is that I was a "special" situation (a fourth-year student who wasn't applying anywhere else). Since then the way we do our ads has changed, and if we advertise this year (it is still murky) our ad will specify that the cover letter should be substantial, and should address issues of mission and institutional "fit". This is a good thing: it strikes me as obviously important that departments that demand serious cover letters make this clear to applicants, lest they should screw things up by sending a generic letter just because they were told that that's the thing to do.

[Ralph Wedgwood]

There is one cardinal rule when it comes to applying for jobs: Read the advertisement and (where applicable) the "further particulars"!

The advertisement and further particulars should make it clear what the hiring committee is looking for.

There are also some good rules of thumb:

1. For senior positions (e.g. tenured positions in North America, or Professorships or Readerships in the UK), a covering letter offering a brief explanation of why you are interested in the position is normally utterly indispensable.
2. For permanent positions in the UK, a covering letter is normally advisable: there are quite likely to be some non-philosophers on the hiring committee, and even if the philosophers will ignore the covering letter, the non-philosophers may take a perfunctory covering letter as evidence that you aren't seriously interested in the job.
3. For entry-level tenure-track positions in North America, a short covering letter won't hurt, but a long covering letter probably won't help.
4. For post-doctoral fellowships and junior research fellowships and the like, a covering letter is usually unnecessary (unless it is specifically requested); at all events it can typically be quite short and perfunctory.

[Tim Schroeder]

A couple of observations: at PhilGourmet-ranked schools, I think a short, perfunctory letter is fine. These schools are mostly interested in getting great scholars, and cover letters carry little information relevant to them. (One exception: if you're a really STELLAR candidate and you want Ohio State to think you'll go there even if Princeton makes you an offer, put your reason for your enormous attraction to Ohio in your cover letter. But this isn't a common problem.)

At schools less obsessed with research, or more obsessed with things in addition to research, cover letters mean more. It has often been pointed out that, for many jobs, there are over a hundred applicants who count as highly qualified on research grounds, and the fine distinctions in research attainment do not decide these jobs or the interviews for them. Nor does teaching dossier often decide them, since it is generally true that there are many more than 10-15 applicants with outstanding teaching dossiers who might come if offered a position. In these cases, committees are looking for signs that the applicant really wants the job, really would be a good fit, really is a good person to have around, and so on. To the extent that these semi-tangibles decide who gets interviewed, cover letters matter - because cover letters and rec letters speak to these issues, and nothing else typically does.

Unfortunately, to signal that you *really* want a job at X, and *really* would be a good fit, you must win a comparative competition. You must do MORE time- and thought-intensive things than other competitors for the same job, and do them better. (Not, of course, just write more words about how you really, really, really love northern Minnesota.) For this reason, establishing disciplinary norms for such cover letters is impossible without depriving many schools of the comparative information they seek. Of course, what's ideal is that you already actually be the ideal person (your family lives near the job and you long to be near them; your romantic partner is committed to working in that very place; your love of philosophy was engendered and is sustained by doing exactly what that school does; your personality happens to be the sort that fits perfectly with the existing personalities in the department; etc.), but this too is rare, and so we're back to competition between job seekers to signal the relevant things in a way that stands out.

So as to advice: for schools where cover letters matter, think hard about real ways in which you are perhaps a good fit for them in terms of (at least) commitment, school mission, and departmental wants and needs, and indicate the truths that make the case for you in your cover letter. Then, overlay flourishes to the facts (in style, details, evidence of deep knowledge of the kind of teaching the school values, perhaps a slight flash of good humor...) that will give the committee evidence beyond your sayso that you really are a good fit. Commit effort to this in proportion to your desire for the job and your best guess as to how much effort everyone else puts in. And good luck.

[Anonymous Job Seeker #2]

As someone who is on the market and who has taken part (as a non-voting member of the committee) in a TT search at a Small Liberal Arts College, I also think cover letters can be very important. I got my PhD from a top 20 Leiter-ranked department and was told that cover letters didn't need to do anything more than express interest in the position, say what your AOS and AOCs were, and say that would you be available at the APA. I now think that was terrible advice, though I do not believe it was terrible because of negligence on the part of the placement officer. The faculty at my school had all been employed and done their grad work at top tier research universities, and I am quite certain that at such institutions cover letters do not matter much at all.

But since the overwhelming majority of hiring institutions each year are not top tier research universities or Leiter ranked, catering exclusively to the interests of those schools is a bad idea. I have seen dossiers thrown out not just for failing to have a cover letter, but also for having what was obviously a form cover letter. In the current economic climate most SLACs have a significant retention worry, not because they are all terrified that the person will leave not long after being hired, but because of the fear their TT line will be taken away the next time a request to hire is submitted to administration and replaced with the permission to hire a lecturer or collection of adjuncts. They have to get the hiring right. Even if you are a very academically strong SLAC the potential costs of losing the person are too high to risk the position on someone who has not shown they want to live and work there. And it is worth keeping in mind that at most SLACs and small state schools the departments are so small, and the teaching loads so large, that even if they are confident of being able to hire a replacement for you if you leave, the prospect of another year running a search is daunting. If there are 2 or 3 people in the department then running a job search gobbles up all the time they would have devoted to research in that academic year.

If you are coming from a highly ranked school I would recommend including in your cover letter some legitimate reasons to think that you would be comfortable settling into the position for which you are applying for the long term. There are other worries that people from SLACs or small state schools might have, but I think the fear of having to do another search again soon (at best) or losing the TT line (at worst) is probably the most significant one right now.

[dankaufman!]

in my (limited) experience, cover letters were perfectly good pieces of paper until someone printed all over them. i can't recall a single case where someone's cover letter was ever mentioned by a search committee or factored in at all.

moreover, i've had some success/been very lucky on the job market, and my cover letters, if i include one at all, only contain info on which job (when the department is listing more than 1 job) and rank (when it is relevant).

my advice: spend time on other parts of your dossier.

xoxo

[Ulrich Meyer]

In my experience (at a liberal arts college), a good cover letter can make a difference, but only a minor one. That is, a good letter alone is not going to move your application from the "No" pile to the "Yes" pile, nor is a bad one going to move your application in the opposite direction. If the rest of your application does not show promise as a scholar and teacher, your cover letter is not going to persuade people otherwise.

However, to actually get a job, you first need to move from the "Yes" pile to the APA interview list, and from there to the campus interview. That's where a good letter can make a difference. Campus interviews are both expensive and a lot of work for the interviewing department, and nobody wants to waste one of their campus interview slots on a candidate who is not seriously interested in the position. If your cover letter reveals that you have actually thought about the position then that is something that can really help you at this stage. The letter does not have to be super-specific, and you shouldn't spend too much time on it. Just say something nice about the kind of institution that you are applying for, and perhaps about their geographic location. But if you can't do this without sounding forced and unnatural, don't do it.

Many of the positions out there might not be your dream job, and nobody in their right mind really expects you to pretend otherwise. What people are looking for is a willingness to make the most of position they have to offer. A friend of mine (not a philosopher) once interviewed for TT positions in history at two Catholic colleges. Somehow, he couldn't resist the temptation to make a big deal of the fact that he was an atheist. Needless to say, he didn't get either job. The people interviewing him probably would have been happy to hire an atheist; what they clearly didn't want, though, was someone who lacked any judgment about what to say during an interview, and when to shut up. A lot of philosophy jobs are a little bit like this (minus the theism, in most cases): try to persuade the hiring department that you are both willing and able to make a success of the position that they actually have to offer. If you already know you can't do that, don't apply.

[doris]

Bill is of course exactly right: avoid any hint of arrogance or irreverence. Relatedly, I think the posts so far make it clear that the sentiments in Dan's post are (at least) not universally held; additionally, my impression is that signing off with "xoxo" is generally frowned upon.

[Matt]

There seems to be universal agreement that for SLACs (and maybe teaching-heavy jobs generally) detailed cover letters are needed.

While I understand that SLACs want candidates who know what they're getting into and who are likely to stick around if hired, I wonder why the cover letter is the place for job candidates to try to prove that they're such people. Is a cover letter really such a good predictor of fit that it makes sense to weed people out based on it?

I would have thought that first picking candidates based on teaching experience and research profile and then seeing which ones are truly passionate about your college would be just as effective long-run.

I ask because the burden it places on job seekers to have to write detailed letters is significant. And it's quite difficult to say how perfect you'd be for a job based on a short ad and a college's website.

[Jason Leddington]

I'm pretty surprised at some of the bad advice being given here.

There is no question that a reasonably detailed cover-letter is a must when applying to SLACs and other teaching-focused institutions.

I say this as someone with experience on several search committees at an SLAC. And while I'm not saying that your application won't get considered without a decent cover-letter, you'd be foregoing a valuable opportunity to make your case to the hiring committee.

When I first went on the market in 2005, I was given the following advice: for research institutions, two sentences; for other institutions, a substantial letter explaining why you actually want this job. I still think this was good advice, and some of the posts above echo it.

Consider: you've recently finished (or are about to finish) your PhD. The vast majority of your time doing so has been dedicated to research, and only some of your time (for some, *very* little of it) has been dedicated to teaching. And perhaps you even did your undergrad studies at a big research institution. Knowing this, search committees will be asking themselves: "Apart from the fact that we've listed a position in their AOS, why are these candidates applying to our institution? What attracts them to working here? Do they in any way share our values?" (And regardless of whether professors at SLACs, etc., *really* have different values from professors at research institutions, the fact is that SLAC folks, at least, tend to think of themselves this way.) So, you'd be wise to give them answers to these sorts of questions in your cover-letter, because it's likely that nothing else in your dossier will do it. And a candidate who does this successfully *will* look stronger on paper than an otherwise comparable candidate who does not.