Things I Thought: Are Cover Letters Outdated?

I’m looking for a new job at the moment which has got me wondering if covering letters are outdated. Judging from the positions I’ve applied for so far, I’d say a CV plus cover letter is very much the norm for what employers ask for. However the way we communicate online these days seems fundamentally ill-suited to these types of long form messages. It makes applying using a cover letter a strange and often awkward thing to do.

To explain, think about how we communicate online with other people. It’s not through big passages of text, dropped into conversation with the subtly of a second-year philosophy student. No, it’s smaller. We now communicate in short forms sent in quick passages. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram. You name it. All of these are dominated by short messages delivered quickly, sometimes accompanied by emojis.

This is what makes writing a cover letter feel verbose. I wonder if the person reading my cover letters have the patience to finish it. And how will they even be reading it PC? Laptop? Tablet? I suspect each one requires a different approach that I can't really plan for.

I could totally be overthinking things but it's really bugging me.

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