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So AI resumes and AI cover letters are now being auto-submitted to AI generated automated job postings then parsed by hiring AI. What an absolute circus this is becoming.
Has anyone hiring for a company with more than 10 employees in the 21st century even read a cover letter?
And if they have, are they stupid enough to actually believe it?
For most people looking for work, rent's due next month, and they are machine-gunning applications, they aren't actually deeply passionate about getting a job at <your particular company>.
I love cover letters for this reason. It’s easy to tell who is shotgunning and who is thoughtfully applying. I might be lucky in the sense that I still get the latter.
I read them. I don't expect applicants to write them, and if it's a formal letter that they copy-paste around, I skim it and don't really factor it in.
But a lot of times the candidate will say why they are interested in the role (they are passionate about the space, they use the product, etc) and it does give higher intent than just a normal application (which candidates often just spray out).
(I'm at a 20 person company now but read them even at larger companies)
Btw, I do the same when I'm reaching out to a candidate. I'll explain why I'm reaching out and why I think they are a good fit.
If you think a successful cover letter talks about being deeply passionate or otherwise over-the-moon about the company, your understanding of what signal they give is misguided in my opinion. I look just for some indication that it’s a human who has even the smallest understanding of our company, and maybe had some connection from their history to our mission. That is still helpful, including for the new developer I just hired two weeks ago.
The cover letter and free-form two questions I ask are, somewhat surprisingly to me, one of the strongest signals in figuring out whether to talk to someone or not. Resumes can list lots of similar skills, but a plain English writing customized for my job application, even if it’s small, tells me oh so much about their priorities, their writing ability, and more.
And I fully understand they’re looking for a job anywhere to pay the bills. Even as a cofounder of a small company, that’s part of why I work, too :)
My old manager at a 150-person company used to do it for experienced candidates. It was shocking to me. I think his idea was that he wanted you to be at least thoughtful enough to say something specific about the job and your experience.
In Australia, to keep receiving unemployment benefits, you have to apply for 20 jobs a fortnight (or something like that). So you get a lot of unemployed people shot gunning their resume around to fulfil that requirement ().
Requiring a cover letter becomes a neat shorthand way to filter those legitimately applying and those that aren't. Those seeking to fulfil their 20 applications/fortnight quota don't submit cover letters - they still met their requirement, and I don't waste my time reviewing their CV.
(
) Even people legitimately seeking jobs would do this. They would spam out their resume to 12-15 jobs, and then with the time saved, they would use that to 'properly' apply for the handful of jobs they were seriously considering.
Happened to me over 10 years ago - rejection letter had this extra sentence at the end: "In addition, I really love your cover letter". The company back then had about 1000 employees, but it was for a position in a remote office which was probably very small.
Regarding "are they stupid enough to actually believe it" - I don't know, but what do people usually write in cover letters? When I wrote it - it was basically CV, just in text form instead of bullet points. But then _lying_ in cover letter is basically the same as lying on CV, no? Or, if companies tend to believe CVs, I would expect them to at least _pretend_ to believe cover letters, too.
I'm applying for places now. I have a cut-and-paste cover letter that I slightly alter between jobs.
Realistically though I'm applying for jobs that match my skills (more or less). It would be nice if you company is cool and saving the world but I've found that most of the time I get a job and then get passionate about the industry.
Even when the company is cool they are the 4th great place I've applied to and the first 3 I struck out at.
It's always the boring banks and such that ask you the "What attracted you to apply here?".
Actually, this is an excellent development! The job posting, resume + cover letter dance has been an integral part of bullshit work for decades. Why not offload it all to a machine? The results will be roughly the same since it's essentially an overly complicated encoding mechanism for the initial stages of formalized employment negotiations.
It certainly will make the hiring part of the work a little more difficult.
Previously this step could be used as a filter, but now all the letters are going to be good which means the hiring part has just become a little more difficult.
Then we can reach the real end game, RecruiterGPT hiring SoftwareEngineerGPT to work at StartupGPT building the next generation of cover letter generating AI.
I wonder what I would think of a candidate who submits a computer-generated text for me to read, especially when the input is not even human bullet points but just the job post and the resume.
We don't have any formal process for hiring (we're <10 FTE) so whether you add a cover letter is up to you, but if you submit one and I spend my time evaluating your message, and it turns out you had an unrelated third party bullshitting me from the first to the last word, I expect this is not going to go over well.
As an IT person, I do have to commend the automation, though. There are pros and cons to weigh as you use this.
Assuming they give it a once over sanity check, who cares? Hiring is already a smoke and mirrors game where job seekers have zero insight into what is happening behind the scenes.
Is the job posting real? Has it already been promised to someone's buddy? Is the job real, but significantly below market rate? Will this be pre-screened by HR looking for magical keyword X else it gets thrown in the bin? Has John Carmack already applied, and I would be wasting my time? Is the job real, but it will take six weeks before someone deign acknowledges I applied?
If they actually proofread or edit it, how are you going to know? How is it any worse than some job coach formulaically writing it based on the job description and resume? Cover letters are ignored all the time, and generally just serve to add as friction to reduce candidates.
> If they actually proofread or edit it, how are you going to know?
Then it's not just autogenerated: apparently it's what they actually mean to say because they've read it (also: equal time spent compared to me) and still sent it. The problem is that the receiving party cannot know whether that's the case upon receipt if the "this was automatically generated" alert triggers.
> How is it any worse than some job coach formulaically writing it based on the job description and resume?
Someone else doing your applications for you would send a similar message I think, but then you can't just send out 100 in an automated fashion and waste a ton of time (unless you're rich I guess, but then you'd be better off with index investments). I do find it hard to say for sure how I will feel in what-if situations without having been in them.
> Cover letters are ignored all the time, and generally just serve to add as friction to reduce candidates.
Not my experience, but as I wrote in another subthread: the application process may be different in NL/DE versus whereever OP lives, or for my line of work compared to theirs. I wouldn't submit a plain CV without writing a few sentences on why I'm applying regardless of whether that's explicitly stated as required by the receiving company.
The answer you're obviously looking to get is "the same", and indeed, I probably wouldn't enjoy working in a place that can't be bothered to have a human read invited human-submitted text.
Ah yes, I wanted to add that but forgot. Agree on that one. If they can explain to me how it works, how it was built (and not just "I curl $aicorp"), then it's probably positive rather than negative. We do have to get to that stage, though.
This is so funny, I was just doing this with ChatGPT to apply for jobs. If you make me fill out a bullshit form where I fake being passionate about your company, I’m going to get a chatbot to write it for me. End of story. I just need a job, why do you care if I’m passionate about building CRUD apps for you?
I am a pretty hard to read person. I don't excited about switching jobs even if its for more money. I generally have a monotone voice when interviewing.
Some time ago, after an interview I aced, the recruiter called me and asked "why I don't seem to be interested in the position". I was like what? Apparently, because I didn't sound excited about working for an insurance company they were on the fence. The manager I interviewed with at the end was obnoxious, saying things straight from a script. I don't think I can work with people who act like "excited puppies". I'm a damn adult just trying to program and learn new stuff, but mostly put money in my bank.
Maybe I would be excited about working for some space program......but even then there is always the day to day.
I'm not convinced of that, there's lots of people who are diligent but quiet about it. Passion works great in some job contexts, in others it can lead to exploitation, cult-like behavior, groupthink that results in a terrible product etc.
Obviously you want staff that like their work enough to be fully engaged with it, but fake passion is bullshit that's often foisted on us by marketing/HR drones. Think of how people who work at Subway stores are called 'sandwich artists' when the reality is that they'd probably be fired if they deviate even slightly from the approved recipe.
I don't want to work with people who are primarily driven by passion tbh, because they're likely to either burn out or be intransigent when there's a difference of opinion. I just want people to be friendly and not robots.
In my current role, I have to sometimes write T-SQL or PL/SQL stored procedures in 80's/90's tech, sometimes scripts in Groovy, sometimes starightforward Java and sometimes code that interacts with relatively more modern tech like Kafka. Do I prefer some over others? Yes. Do I spend equal amount of care towards quality of code? Also yes.
A good programmer will always try to do a good job irrespective of their level of passion with the stuff they are working on. Does enjoying a specific piece of work more produce better code? Maybe because I would have more fun writing it. But I doubt most of us gets to do the exciting work everyday. Ironically, if you are relying that much on passion, you might get those who cut corners on unexciting work. Rely instead on good programming skills coupled with professionalism.
A professional gets shit done. With my higher experience, I have a better understanding of what provides business value and don't work on it more than that, because it is not valuable.
I am passionated about technology, programming and system design. I have about zero passion for writing documentation and good pull requests - but I do it anyway, and I like to think I do it well.
If I only did the parts of my job I had passion for, I wouldn't be a very good employee. If people only worked for companies they were passioned about most companies would have so much more trouble hiring (who is passionate about working for Wells Fargo? Doing SCADA work for a flour factory?).
We at company XXX are building a solution that does a,b,c.
We want senior level programmer with a preference given to a candidates having these specific skills / domain knowledge.
The job is in the office, (no) need to travel. Requires (or not) clearance / degree / license / etc.
We pay this much (range is ok) and offering such and such benefits.
Please explain why you are a good candidate for this job.
Skip enthusiastic, passionate, hard working, woke, tolerant, etc. etc. bullshit because everyone is asking the same crappy questions here and gets the same crappy answers and it is all meaningless.
We don’t require cover letters, but a lot of people send them anyway. Many of them are useless boilerplate. Even before ChatGPT, you could tell that a lot of people looked up generic cover letter boilerplate and treated it like a mad libs where they filled in the company name and job position.
I wish more people knew just how low the bar was for writing a decent cover letter. You don’t need to spend hours researching the company or choosing the perfect prose. Just a few short sentences that add some context to your application that might not be fully captured in a resume format can make a huge difference.
The weirdest part is that when you get people into a conversation, like on the initial phone call, they can usually come up with a quick elevator pitch for themselves on the spot that would have been great cover letter material. Yet there’s something about the cover letter format that makes some people clam up and get writer’s block. Or they just hate the idea of writing something for someone else to read, so they don’t put any effort in.
Regardless, I don’t think ChatGPT generated cover letters are going to push this ahead. The samples look like it’s yet another ChatGPT style generically safe output. I also feel like I’m rapidly getting good at sensing ChatGPT style writing.
Yep. The bar is so incredibly low for communication.
I know job searching isn’t fun, but it’s shocking to see how some candidates act like they can’t be bothered to even have simple person-to-person discussion about their application or career interests or write even a simple written description.
This just devalues cover letters. As a hiring manager I am strongly motivated to avoid channels which would cause me to wade through a bunch of fake crap. If there turns out to be no way to filter out AI generated text, we will end up that you have to attend an in person interview at some intermediary whose job is just to verify that you are a human being and you have some idea what the job ad said.
If the main reason you’re making me write a cover letter is to verify that I am human and know what the job description said, you don’t deserve anything better than LLM generated.
We don't make people write them presently, but the occasional one can be good way to clarify why a person fits the role especially if their CV isn't quite an obvious match. If they will be generated by AI then I won't have time to go through them.
My bigger worry is that we will start getting AI generated CVs. If we have to ignore CVs then there will be no alternative to paying middlemen.
This must vary a lot on context. For the hiring I've done, they're usually a 'low signal' only because they are so uniformly poor. I do read them, and a cogent, original letter immediately stands out.
by no means - when i was doing hiring (not now) cover letter was almost always the most important thing. the cv says what you have done, the cover says what you want to do.
> So like a recruiting agency that does pre-screening? That is a thing already.
and a very bad thing - i do not want possible good candidates screened out by some chinless-wonder in an agency.
It will be interesting to see how ChatGPT interacts with BS jobs. Could go a lot of ways. One interesting scenario is if humans to finally accept that if you have a big population in a technologically advanced society, the demand for human labor is going to drop, while the supply increases. The only real jobs are those that require rare talent, on a power law dist. The best they can do is no negative contribution. NPCs just live, reproduce, and then see if their kids can do better. In general, this process will continue until ALL humans have BS jobs, or no jobs. So it's good to deal with it now.
As a person who has put a lot of heart and creativity into cover letters for select companies I was very interested in and received form letters declining my candidacy -- I think the process devalues cover letters more than any tool like this (or even the templates that have existed prior).
Low-effort cover letters have been around forever.
As far as I'm seeing, this is just another tool to provide boilerplate cover letters where people lack communication ability to write their own.
As a hiring manager, the majority of cover letters I already receive are basically worthless. You can tell when someone is writing a cover letter because they think they have to, or when someone is writing a cover letter because they've actually thought about how to communicate something to the hiring manager.
Most of the boilerplate cover letters communicate basically nothing useful, and I end up ignoring them after the first read through.
When people make an effort, though, I make sure to carry the cover letter through the interview process so we can all collect the additional context as we interview the candidate.
People who will cheat the written portion of the hiring process already do so without automation, by plagiarizing others resume and cover letters or by farming out the work to someone else.
Realise that this means more recruiters and it being a hugely valuable service all of a sudden, whereas today it is maybe neutral on the average (helpful for some, annoying for most). Since random strangers on the internet couldn't be trusted in this possible scenario, recruiting firms could be the ones to build up reputations of having suitable/legitimate candidates. You might not realistically be able to get around them.
More middle (wo)men does not sound like an improvement. But to be fair, I don't really know what the deal is with cover letters. When applying to a job, I always write some text in the email that explains why I can do that job and why I'm interested at all, it's not like I just drop my CV on an email address and trust the recipient to take it from there. The application process may be different in NL/DE versus whereever OP lives, or for my line of work compared to theirs.
Ask your HR Director what share of non-mass hiring hires were made in the last year from responses to job postings. I guarantee it will be less than 20%.
This is why the cold job search process is so awful. No one cares about the least efficient channel. It should be the last resort in your job search, and it’s absolutely fair to try and game this broken system with a cover letter generator.
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I am writing to apply for the Expert Contributor role at YCombinator LLC. As a Hacker News Demigod with a passion for crafting finger-licking, succulent comments, I am confident in my ability to exceed your expectations and make a significant contribution to your team.
With my experience as a self-employed Hacker News commentator and my track record of consistently producing top-rated comments, I believe that I have the skills and expertise necessary to excel in this role. I possess supersonic news scanning skills, lightning-fast research and fact-checking abilities, and am fluent in tech and startup lingo. Additionally, I am an expert in crafting snarky comebacks that engage readers and drive discussions forward. You can check my website www.github.com for some of my latest hilarious contributions.
My experience as a Cleverest Tech Support Commenter has honed my ability to write with a hip and snarky voice that resonates with IT enthusiasts. As such, I am confident that I can help make your brand go viral, buzzy, and catchy, ensuring that your logo is as sticky as a post-it on a laptop. I can also conjure side-splitting, tear-jerking, and occasionally thought-provoking content out of thin air at least thrice an hour.
I am fluent in news speak, tech babble, and sanctimonious comebacks, and can combine knowledge, wit, and buzzwords to make each comment truly legendary. I am also in possession of a keyboard (required) and a cape (optional - but recommended) to help me fight for the truth and justice in the Hacker News realm.
Thank you for considering my application. I look forward to the opportunity to discuss my qualifications further, and maybe meet your virtual dog in a VR conference.
Sincerely, John "Upvote" Doe
Thank you for your application for the Expert Contributor role at YCombinator LLC. Your cover letter certainly caught our attention, and we appreciate your enthusiasm and passion for Hacker News.
We were impressed with your track record of consistently producing top-rated comments and your lightning-fast research and fact-checking abilities. Your ability to craft snarky comebacks that engage readers and drive discussions forward is also a valuable skill in the world of tech and startups.
We also took a look at your GitHub page and found some of your latest contributions to be both hilarious and thought-provoking. Your experience as a Cleverest Tech Support Commenter and your ability to write with a hip and snarky voice that resonates with IT enthusiasts is also a valuable asset.
At YCombinator LLC, we are always on the lookout for talented individuals who can help us make our brand go viral, buzzy, and catchy. We believe that your skills and expertise would be a great asset to our team.
We would like to invite you to a virtual interview to discuss your qualifications further. Please let us know if this works for you, and we can arrange a convenient time.
Thank you again for your interest in YCombinator LLC, and we look forward to speaking with you soon.
Sincerely,
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And if they have, are they stupid enough to actually believe it?
For most people looking for work, rent's due next month, and they are machine-gunning applications, they aren't actually deeply passionate about getting a job at <your particular company>.
But a lot of times the candidate will say why they are interested in the role (they are passionate about the space, they use the product, etc) and it does give higher intent than just a normal application (which candidates often just spray out).
(I'm at a 20 person company now but read them even at larger companies)
Btw, I do the same when I'm reaching out to a candidate. I'll explain why I'm reaching out and why I think they are a good fit.
If you think a successful cover letter talks about being deeply passionate or otherwise over-the-moon about the company, your understanding of what signal they give is misguided in my opinion. I look just for some indication that it’s a human who has even the smallest understanding of our company, and maybe had some connection from their history to our mission. That is still helpful, including for the new developer I just hired two weeks ago.
The cover letter and free-form two questions I ask are, somewhat surprisingly to me, one of the strongest signals in figuring out whether to talk to someone or not. Resumes can list lots of similar skills, but a plain English writing customized for my job application, even if it’s small, tells me oh so much about their priorities, their writing ability, and more.
And I fully understand they’re looking for a job anywhere to pay the bills. Even as a cofounder of a small company, that’s part of why I work, too :)
Requiring a cover letter becomes a neat shorthand way to filter those legitimately applying and those that aren't. Those seeking to fulfil their 20 applications/fortnight quota don't submit cover letters - they still met their requirement, and I don't waste my time reviewing their CV.
(
) Even people legitimately seeking jobs would do this. They would spam out their resume to 12-15 jobs, and then with the time saved, they would use that to 'properly' apply for the handful of jobs they were seriously considering.Regarding "are they stupid enough to actually believe it" - I don't know, but what do people usually write in cover letters? When I wrote it - it was basically CV, just in text form instead of bullet points. But then _lying_ in cover letter is basically the same as lying on CV, no? Or, if companies tend to believe CVs, I would expect them to at least _pretend_ to believe cover letters, too.
Realistically though I'm applying for jobs that match my skills (more or less). It would be nice if you company is cool and saving the world but I've found that most of the time I get a job and then get passionate about the industry.
Even when the company is cool they are the 4th great place I've applied to and the first 3 I struck out at.
It's always the boring banks and such that ask you the "What attracted you to apply here?".
Related tangent, harming the sick:
Healthcare expense reimbursement denial by software, decisions "blessed" by Doctor at 60,000 diagnoses rejected per month.
- https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health...
Previously this step could be used as a filter, but now all the letters are going to be good which means the hiring part has just become a little more difficult.
Is this a good thing? I guess?
I really hope AI cover letters finally put an end to this nonsense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35307441
We don't have any formal process for hiring (we're <10 FTE) so whether you add a cover letter is up to you, but if you submit one and I spend my time evaluating your message, and it turns out you had an unrelated third party bullshitting me from the first to the last word, I expect this is not going to go over well.
As an IT person, I do have to commend the automation, though. There are pros and cons to weigh as you use this.
Is the job posting real? Has it already been promised to someone's buddy? Is the job real, but significantly below market rate? Will this be pre-screened by HR looking for magical keyword X else it gets thrown in the bin? Has John Carmack already applied, and I would be wasting my time? Is the job real, but it will take six weeks before someone deign acknowledges I applied?
Then it's not just autogenerated: apparently it's what they actually mean to say because they've read it (also: equal time spent compared to me) and still sent it. The problem is that the receiving party cannot know whether that's the case upon receipt if the "this was automatically generated" alert triggers.
> How is it any worse than some job coach formulaically writing it based on the job description and resume?
Someone else doing your applications for you would send a similar message I think, but then you can't just send out 100 in an automated fashion and waste a ton of time (unless you're rich I guess, but then you'd be better off with index investments). I do find it hard to say for sure how I will feel in what-if situations without having been in them.
> Cover letters are ignored all the time, and generally just serve to add as friction to reduce candidates.
Not my experience, but as I wrote in another subthread: the application process may be different in NL/DE versus whereever OP lives, or for my line of work compared to theirs. I wouldn't submit a plain CV without writing a few sentences on why I'm applying regardless of whether that's explicitly stated as required by the receiving company.
how would you know?
It doesn't say anything useful anyway.
I am a pretty hard to read person. I don't excited about switching jobs even if its for more money. I generally have a monotone voice when interviewing.
Some time ago, after an interview I aced, the recruiter called me and asked "why I don't seem to be interested in the position". I was like what? Apparently, because I didn't sound excited about working for an insurance company they were on the fence. The manager I interviewed with at the end was obnoxious, saying things straight from a script. I don't think I can work with people who act like "excited puppies". I'm a damn adult just trying to program and learn new stuff, but mostly put money in my bank.
Maybe I would be excited about working for some space program......but even then there is always the day to day.
Because people that lack passion for their work cut corners to avoid doing it.
Obviously you want staff that like their work enough to be fully engaged with it, but fake passion is bullshit that's often foisted on us by marketing/HR drones. Think of how people who work at Subway stores are called 'sandwich artists' when the reality is that they'd probably be fired if they deviate even slightly from the approved recipe.
I don't want to work with people who are primarily driven by passion tbh, because they're likely to either burn out or be intransigent when there's a difference of opinion. I just want people to be friendly and not robots.
A good programmer will always try to do a good job irrespective of their level of passion with the stuff they are working on. Does enjoying a specific piece of work more produce better code? Maybe because I would have more fun writing it. But I doubt most of us gets to do the exciting work everyday. Ironically, if you are relying that much on passion, you might get those who cut corners on unexciting work. Rely instead on good programming skills coupled with professionalism.
A professional gets shit done. With my higher experience, I have a better understanding of what provides business value and don't work on it more than that, because it is not valuable.
I am passionated about technology, programming and system design. I have about zero passion for writing documentation and good pull requests - but I do it anyway, and I like to think I do it well.
If I only did the parts of my job I had passion for, I wouldn't be a very good employee. If people only worked for companies they were passioned about most companies would have so much more trouble hiring (who is passionate about working for Wells Fargo? Doing SCADA work for a flour factory?).
If you want everything done "by the book", you want a pedantic anal retentive asshole. Unfortunately I never see that in job descriptions.
We at company XXX are building a solution that does a,b,c.
We want senior level programmer with a preference given to a candidates having these specific skills / domain knowledge.
The job is in the office, (no) need to travel. Requires (or not) clearance / degree / license / etc.
We pay this much (range is ok) and offering such and such benefits.
Please explain why you are a good candidate for this job.
Skip enthusiastic, passionate, hard working, woke, tolerant, etc. etc. bullshit because everyone is asking the same crappy questions here and gets the same crappy answers and it is all meaningless.
I wish more people knew just how low the bar was for writing a decent cover letter. You don’t need to spend hours researching the company or choosing the perfect prose. Just a few short sentences that add some context to your application that might not be fully captured in a resume format can make a huge difference.
The weirdest part is that when you get people into a conversation, like on the initial phone call, they can usually come up with a quick elevator pitch for themselves on the spot that would have been great cover letter material. Yet there’s something about the cover letter format that makes some people clam up and get writer’s block. Or they just hate the idea of writing something for someone else to read, so they don’t put any effort in.
Regardless, I don’t think ChatGPT generated cover letters are going to push this ahead. The samples look like it’s yet another ChatGPT style generically safe output. I also feel like I’m rapidly getting good at sensing ChatGPT style writing.
“I’m applying for this internship because I have already done Java in class and that’s where I want to spend my career”
That would be 4 lines more than all my internship applicants.
I know job searching isn’t fun, but it’s shocking to see how some candidates act like they can’t be bothered to even have simple person-to-person discussion about their application or career interests or write even a simple written description.
2. Bob uses AI to convert Alice's corporate bullshit into concise summary.
Deleted Comment
My bigger worry is that we will start getting AI generated CVs. If we have to ignore CVs then there will be no alternative to paying middlemen.
They already are very low signal.
> we will end up that you have to attend an in person interview at some intermediary
So like a recruiting agency that does pre-screening? That is a thing already.
This must vary a lot on context. For the hiring I've done, they're usually a 'low signal' only because they are so uniformly poor. I do read them, and a cogent, original letter immediately stands out.
by no means - when i was doing hiring (not now) cover letter was almost always the most important thing. the cv says what you have done, the cover says what you want to do.
> So like a recruiting agency that does pre-screening? That is a thing already.
and a very bad thing - i do not want possible good candidates screened out by some chinless-wonder in an agency.
If it can be done by ChatGPT .. there's no point in the ritual; we'll most likely end up scrapping it.
No cover letters. No marketing fluff. No library photography. Less hiring. Less jobs.
Personally, I like the UBI idea.
Low-effort cover letters have been around forever.
As far as I'm seeing, this is just another tool to provide boilerplate cover letters where people lack communication ability to write their own.
As a hiring manager, the majority of cover letters I already receive are basically worthless. You can tell when someone is writing a cover letter because they think they have to, or when someone is writing a cover letter because they've actually thought about how to communicate something to the hiring manager.
Most of the boilerplate cover letters communicate basically nothing useful, and I end up ignoring them after the first read through.
When people make an effort, though, I make sure to carry the cover letter through the interview process so we can all collect the additional context as we interview the candidate.
More middle (wo)men does not sound like an improvement. But to be fair, I don't really know what the deal is with cover letters. When applying to a job, I always write some text in the email that explains why I can do that job and why I'm interested at all, it's not like I just drop my CV on an email address and trust the recipient to take it from there. The application process may be different in NL/DE versus whereever OP lives, or for my line of work compared to theirs.
For technical hires I'd be looking at their interests i.e. github likes on followed projects, created works, etc.
This makes for good conversation in interviews are gets to the point of seeing if their a good fit.
This is why the cold job search process is so awful. No one cares about the least efficient channel. It should be the last resort in your job search, and it’s absolutely fair to try and game this broken system with a cover letter generator.