The draft opened with “I have long admired Acme’s commitment to excellence.” Acme’s posting was twelve lines about a night-shift warehouse role and a forklift certificate. Nobody at that loading dock needs to be admired for excellence. The next paragraph said I had led a team of twenty. My CV says I have led four. The model had upgraded me. Both sentences went in the bin before I read the rest, which is the correct order. Flattery and fiction first. Then see if any sentence is mine.
Inputs that keep the draft smaller than my ego
I paste a short CV extract — the two roles that match — and the posting. I name the company and the job title in the first line of the paste so the letter cannot drift to a different req I had open yesterday. AI Cover Letter is told not to invent qualifications. It still invents tone, and sometimes it invents a team size. The instruction reduces the problem. It does not close it. I diff every factual clause against the CV the way I diff a rewrite.
If the CV is a designed PDF, I extract text first. If the extract is garbage, I fix the text in CV Maker and I paste from there. A letter built on a scrambled extract will confidently describe a job I did not have, because the dates stuck to the wrong employer. I have seen my university listed as an employer. It was a heading that collided with the next line.
| Draft sentence | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Admired your commitment to excellence | Delete. Not about this job |
| Led a team of twenty | Delete. CV says four |
| I can start night shifts on the 14th and I have the forklift certificate | Keep, if both are true. This is the letter |
| I am passionate about logistics ecosystems | Delete. I can drive the truck or I cannot |
Length and the portal box
Half a page. One screen on a phone. If the portal has a 1500-character box, I write to the box, not to an imaginary printed letter. The model will give you a polite three paragraphs plus a closing that repeats paragraph one. I cut the repeat. I keep one proof: the certificate, the shift, the tool. A second proof only if the posting asked for two different things. A third proof is a CV in paragraph form, and they already have the CV.
I change the company name and the proof every time. The skeleton can be reused: what I am applying for, one proof, when I can start, how to reach me. The sentences that contain the proper nouns cannot. I search the draft for the previous company’s name before I send. That search has saved me more than any model.
Voice: I read it aloud. If I would not say “leverage my skill set” to a person, I do not send it. The warehouse letter ended as six lines. The model had produced 400 words. Six lines took me longer, which is normal. The button is a pile of clay. The time is in the cutting.
What I will not ask the letter to do
I will not ask it to explain a gap with a medical story, a lawsuit, or anyone else’s failure. Those details do not belong in a model prompt, and they rarely belong in the letter. If a gap needs a sentence, I write that sentence myself, short, without the drama the model will add to sound human.
I will not ask it to be funny. Humor in a first letter to a stranger is a coin flip, and the model’s humor is usually a slogan. I will not ask for “more passion.” Passion is how the excellence sentence comes back after I deleted it.
Attachments: some portals want the letter as PDF. I export after the words are final. I do not lock it. A recruiter who cannot open the letter will not request the password. I do not merge the letter onto the CV unless they asked for one file. If they asked for one file, I merge after both pieces are final, and I check that page 1 is the letter or the CV according to what they said. Order errors are human. I have sent the CV first when they wanted the letter first. They still read it. I would rather not depend on that.
The posting text is someone else’s writing. Pasting it into the tool sends it to the model. A public job ad is fine. An internal req marked confidential is not, even if a friend forwarded it and a letter would be convenient. Convenience is not the confidentiality rule. I can write the letter from my own notes about the role without pasting their document.
I keep the sent letter in the application folder next to the CV version I sent. When they reply three weeks later, I want to see what I claimed. The model will not remember. The folder will. Name it with the company, not cover-final.pdf, or you will attach last month’s admiration of a different company’s excellence.
The letter that was better as five lines I typed
Night-shift warehouse, forklift certificate, start date the 14th. I typed those three facts and a greeting and a goodbye. I did not run the tool. The tool’s draft is in a scratch file as a reminder of what I refused to send, which is useful when I am tempted to sound grander on a job I want more. The grander job, a coordinator role, did go through the tool because I had two real projects to choose from and I wanted to see which one it would bury. It buried the relevant one and led with an older title. I swapped them. The draft’s only contribution was showing me my own bad instinct to lead with the older, fancier title. I already knew the instinct. Seeing it in clean prose made it obvious enough to cut.
I do not mention the tool in the letter. “I used AI to write this” is not a professional disclosure I owe a loading dock, and it is not a flex. The letter is mine when every sentence matches a fact I can say out loud in the interview. If I cannot say the sentence out loud without wincing, it does not go in, regardless of grammar.
Recruiter forms that ask for a letter and then also ask “why this role” in a separate box: I do not paste the same paragraph in both. The letter carries the certificate and the date. The box carries one sentence about the shift pattern, which is the thing the letter did not need to repeat. Duplication looks like a mail merge even when a human wrote both. I learned that from a rejection that quoted my repeated sentence back with a question mark. Fair.
PDF export of the letter: I check the line breaks on the certificate number. A number split across a line with a hyphen has been typed back wrong by a clerk. I keep the certificate token on one line. Small, and it is the sort of defect a model will never see because it does not export the PDF. The export is after the words. I open the PDF once. Then I send that file, not a second export I make “to be sure” and forget to compare.