dont start your cover letter with my name is and other rules

dont start your cover letter with my name is and other rules dont start your cover letter with my name is and other rules Some random thoughts from hiring work recently, in no particular order: * Do not start your cover letter with My name is unless you are under the age of 10. This does not make you sound like a grown-up. * When a job posting asks for something like 2-3 years experience and you have 10+ years of experience, you need to address that in your cover letter. That employer is telling you clearly that theyre envisioning someone more junior in their career than you are, and your chances of being considered will go up dramatically if you explain why youre interested anyway and why youd excel in the job. You might think that this is obvious (and that clearly more knowledge and more experience will help you do a better job), but if you dont explicitly address it, they will assume that you didnt read the job posting clearly, that youll be bored in the role, or that youre going to try to turn the role into something other than what they need, and they will pass you up. * Stop writing Salary is negotiable when the recipient of your letter never even asked you about salary. * Do not  send a resume with no dates of employment on it. Ive seen a handful of candidates doing this recently, and someone out there must be telling them that this is a good thing to do (probably to avoid age discrimination, is my guess). This makes it look like youre trying to hide something, and its incredibly unhelpful I want to know how recent your experience was and how long you did it for. Holding a job for 10 months nine years ago is very different from having done it for five years very recently. (And if it is  being done to avoid revealing your age, you have now done the opposite, by  highlighting weirdness about your age.) * Speaking of dates, if there are jobs from the 1970s on your resume, its time to take them off. Unless thats the decade you spent as a cabinet official or something, its really not relevant to your candidacy at this point.