You can grab a resume cover letter template off the web. It will be expedient. But be honest. It won't get you the job. A cover letter that really brings attention has to pop somehow. It should grab the recruiter's attention. And if yours doesn't, at least one from your competitors will.

Here are just a few powerful tricks that will make your job packet rise to the top:

Make your letter clever without crossing the line to joking.

Out-and-out humor isn't successful in a cover letter. It's almost never done well..

As opposed to telling jokes, identify with the employer in a light-hearted way. Try - "We were being creative keeping each other motivated. So every Friday was our have-a-great-weekend-you're-coming-back-Monday mixer."

Then connect yourself to identify with the hiring manager. "And maybe your staff has felt that kind of pressure and relief as well."

And finally, move to what you can add. "Going through that experience taught me a lot about keeping staff motivated under duress. And I'd be happy to talk to you about how that translates to your business."

Go look over your resume, your biggest accomplishments. Pick one which translates into a very brief anecdote you can tell that will resonate with the recruiter. Use that anecdote to replace paragraph 2 or 3 on your resume cover letter template.

Add symbols to the page.

Typographic elements are one more feature regularly forgotten by cover letter writers. You can direct attention to your strengths by including all sorts of elements on the page - bulleting, numbers, underlining, boldface, rows made of asterisks *****(fantastic for Johnson boxes. If you don't know what they are, look it up.), boxes with grey shading, and block quotes.

Obviously, you don't over do it on one side. But deliberate use of one or two techniques can draw your hiring manager in.

Tables are very much underused as well. They can be put to terrific use chiefly when you're submitting an application for a job that requires specialized talents. Just create a table with the requirements on left side and your talents on the right side. It saves you from the tedium of saying - you need, and I have - over and over again.

Bullet point a couple of paragraphs in your cover letter. Put a johnson box at the top. Or use a table in place of the paragraph where you speak to the job requirements.

Make yourself the obvious choice.

Maximize every portion of your job packet to attract the recruiter's attention. Go get a system that enables you to modify a resume cover letter template so they are absolutely optimized to get you calls.

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Do it now before even just 4 of the other 371 guys competing for your job do.