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cvsalvo · Posted: Thu May 03, 2007 11:58 am Post subject: Please criticque my cover letter

I wrote a cover letter and I will apprecitae if you can give me some suggestion to improve it. It's directed for a R&D position in Belgium for an automotive brand. I could'n t find any reference to the person to address it.
Thank you in advance for any hint

To Whom It May Concern,

From your company's web site I learned about an open position as a Senior Energy Researcher. I am very interested in this position at Xxxx since I seek a challenging R&D environment where I can contribute with my experience and enthusiasm for research. I believe in my potential to succeed in research for future energy in automotive as in my past projects; I am confident that my multidisciplinary expertise gives me a synergetic and valuable vision of the many components and complex processes that can be involved in this research area. Furthermore, I will be glad to relocate in the Xxxxx region since personal reasons are linking me to Germany.

I hold a postdoctoral research fellowship at the department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Xxxxxx in USA. I have been conducting university research for over 4 years in the field of power electronics and electrical drives with applications including energy management on electric vehicles (fuel cells, electrochemical batteries and supercapacitors) and microgeneration from renewable energy sources (wind turbines and photovoltaic arrays). In the last semester, I supervised part of a successful project sponsored by Xxxxx and the xxxxx in the area of real time simulation; I designed and assembled the hardware section of a Power Hardware in the Loop platform for testing of converters and coordinated software development tasks. I have experience of planning activities in research projects and I have always persistently operated to achieve the expected results respecting deadlines and budget constraints.

I look forward to discussing more in detail how my experience and personal skills can benefit the Xxxxx R&D.
Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

ank06 · Expert Joined: 20 Sep 2006 Posts: 248 Career Advice: +1/-0

Your cover letter is quite impressive, even if I have some things to say. First, careful because you are repeating yourself (actually overusing the word "position") in the beginning. You might want to use some other word in there, like post or something.
Also, you're overusing the first person personal pronoun. You are talking a lot about yourself when you should be talking about what you can do for the respective company. So you might want to avoid this.
Nothing else in the rest.

ResumeWriter · Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 3:13 am Post subject: Cover Letter Advice

Cover letters have always been the "ify" part of the job-search process. Are they read? Thrown away? When a cover letter is delivered to a hiring manager's desk, is it read even when no one else is around to witness it? Just kidding, of course. My thought is if you're going to put effort into a cover letter, make the most of it.

Think of ditching the basic intro lines. Back in the day companies liked learning how jobseekers heard about them. But today, company websites and job-search portals are bringing in candidates by the droves. Ask yourself what value that information adds to your candidacy. The idea is to start "selling" yourself right out of the gate. Use that valuable space to draw reader's attention. Think about the following:

Delete: "From your company's web site I learned about an open position as a Senior Energy Researcher. I am very interested in this position at Xxxx since I seek a challenging R&D environment where I can contribute with my experience and enthusiasm for research. I believe in my potential to succeed in research for future energy in automotive as in my past projects; I am confident that my multidisciplinary expertise gives me a synergetic and valuable vision of the many components and complex processes that can be involved in this research area. Furthermore, I will be glad to relocate in the Xxxxx region since personal reasons are linking me to Germany."

Replace: "Research has been part of my life for the last 4 years ... so when I learned of your opening for a Senior Energy Researcher, I knew my background in data mining, report culmination/analysis, and survey development was a perfect match. Noted by a recent superior, I'm maticulous when fact finding through industry tools and resources."

List some specific tools, systems, software, or other resources you feel are used by this prospective employer. Definitely incorporate as many keywords into the top section as possible. Focus specifically on the company and the open position.

Your second paragraph is good. Try to start it out with something different than a pronoun. The paragraph contains several relevant keywords, which will be eye-catching to the reader.

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