Do cover letters still matter in 2025, so the cover letter mattered a lot. However, how can cover letters be used in 2025 and do they still matter? My name is Chris Villanueva. I’m the co-founder of Let’s Eat, Grandma Resume Service. I founded this company with my brother over 10 years ago and we’ve helped thousands of job seekers just like you to get noticed and land their dream job. Head on over to letseatgrandma.com and submit your resume for a free review.

Chris Villanueva 00:35
Now today we’re going to be talking all about cover letters. It is one of those controversial topics that have resurfaced time and time again, and I’m just so excited to talk to you about this because I know it’s something that you are wondering, especially if you are tuned in today. First of all, there are some nuances to the hiring process as well as how we are developing our application materials here in 2025, AI has continued to grow and become a thing, and specifically on the job seeker side, we have generative AI in which people can throw together a cover letter real fast and send it away, send it off to a company, and from the recruiter side or the hiring manager side, we have it being used to search for and filter out candidates in a supposedly better way. AI

Chris Villanueva 01:28
Time will only tell if all of this is getting us to a better place than where we were, but we do know that there are some changes that have been made to the hiring landscape, and I’ll try to take those into consideration as they give you some advice today on cover letters. So just a quick side note on AI. I thought this was a genius piece of insight from Typeform who I’m subscribed to on their newsletter. So Typeform is in the world of online marketing and they said that AI is not making bad marketing better. They’re not essentially making bad marketing into good marketing, but they’re making bad marketing faster, and I was like, oh my gosh, that is genius, and that can be applied to resumes and cover letters as well. AI is not making bad cover letters. Good. Instead, they’re making so many of these bad cover letters just faster.

Chris Villanueva 02:21 
So I’m not saying not to use ai, but I’m going to give you some insights today that should hopefully change the game and how you think about sending cover letters. First of all, do cover letters even matter? Do cover letters still matter in 2025? Yes, but not as much as they used to. An interesting tidbit is the very first cover letter sent out was supposedly by Leonardo DaVinci to the Duke of Milan. He sent it as a letter to go on top of resume, a Renaissance era, resume, whatever that looked like to say why he had the skills and qualifications for the role. Flash forward to the nineties, the 1990s. Loved the cover letter. They loved baggy jeans, they loved Michael Jordan amongst other things that Gen Zers are oddly trying to bring back today, but they also loved the cover letter. It was getting more and more competitive as there were more positions available, more people applying and online really wasn’t a thing, obviously as much as it was in the two thousands and the 2000 tens, but some of that had some influence in the late nineties.

Chris Villanueva 03:32
Here the cover letter mattered a lot. However, as more and more ways for applicants to distinguish themselves such as LinkedIn, as these things became available, the prominence and dominance of the cover letter began to decline. Now, the cover letter is still something that companies are asking for today, and it is still something that can be used to set yourself apart, but I think that the way most people are using cover letters today is not useful and not productive to the job search.

Chris Villanueva 04:05
So my key takeaway today is in 2025, cover letters are still useful, they’re still relevant, however, only if to stand out, only if you are able to make some sort of distinction to help you stand out in your job search. There’s one more thing that I’ll add to that that is not as important in my opinion, but if you’re not using your cover letter to help you to stand out and show why you were the perfect applicant for the specific role at the company you’re applying for, then it’s not going to do anything.

Chris Villanueva 04:36
Now, I’ll give another reason and another nuance to the cover letter. A cover letter can be used to overcome a shortcoming, for example, or to describe something that you feel like the resume could not do that you think the hiring manager might worry about, such as a career gap or the fact that you are making a massive career transition such as a career gap or the fact that you are making a massive career transition and you want to provide some context to the resume. I think that’s another supplemental reason to use the cover letter and to ensure that the hiring manager gets it. But most of the time people are just saying, I am going to be using this cover letter as a convention, and so I submit this cover letter to you to apply for such and such role. I have X, Y, z, and everything that the resume already said.

Chris Villanueva 05:22 
If you were doing that, you’re just wasting your time. So here are some things that you can do to set yourself apart to get that cover letter in tip top shape and to make sure that you’re not wasting your time here. For one, I would say use it as an extra opportunity to get more human. And so with resumes, we don’t use pronouns, we don’t really talk about my personal story or things like that. You can’t really go into as much detail. I say, for example, make sure that your resume bullet points are short, punchy, and sweet. Your cover letter, you can get a little bit more prosaic and fill out an entire paragraph to go into detail. So if you have any stories that you feel like you can expand upon to draw the connection to the company you’re applying for, that would be your opportunity to do so.

Chris Villanueva 06:08 
If for example, you’re applying for a company in which the company culture of mountain biking, kind of just throwing random stuff out there, if that is going to be really important, then maybe you can bring a story about how you were able to volunteer for an organization that involved mountain biking and getting kids active out in their cities in a safe way. Just pulling stuff out of my brain. Hope this works, hope this makes sense. But you get the point. Make sure to draw the connections to the company as much as possible. Another thing you could try, and again, I’m throwing things out and hopefully giving you things that you’ve never heard of before or never considered, but perhaps a video cover letter. A video cover letter is something that I would say 99% of people are not doing, but it is a way that you can distinguish yourself by making you appear more human and to really sell yourself in a different way.

Chris Villanueva 07:01 
An example of how you can do that is you could submit something that looks like a cover letter, maybe it’s a paragraph, but you transmit this electronically such as an email and hyperlink a ARD video of you. ARD is a really solid piece of software that I use and you get up to five minutes for free. In fact, if you’re going over five minutes for something like this, you’re probably just wasting your time because that’s too long. But what I would say is use this and hyperlink it and send it to a hiring manager. I’m not saying that this is right for everyone. I’m just trying to give you ideas and creative ways to stand out. Another way that you can use a cover letter in a more modern way is by putting the same idea in the same concept in the body of an email.

Chris Villanueva 07:45
I’ve done this before as I was applying for a general manager position for a club way back in my restaurant hospitality hotel days. But I did that and it was well received because it wasn’t like this extra attachment. The person didn’t ask for the cover letter, but I was using it to transmit my resume and to provide some more context to who I am as a professional and to really sell the fact that I had a reduced expenses for one of the properties that I had worked for that I was able to increase the profitability and tell a story because I knew that’s what this club was looking for. So at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’re sending it as a conventional cover letter, you could still use paragraphs, stories and additional context as an amazing way to supplement your resume and to get noticed and to stand out.

Chris Villanueva 08:35
I hope this got you thinking about the ways that you could move forward in your job search. If you are looking for cover letter help or resume or LinkedIn help as well, head on over to letseatgrandma.com We are a company of service, so we want to make you feel supported in any way we can, whether it’s our boutique resume writing packages or our free resources.

Chris Villanueva 08:57 
Thank you so much for tuning in and I’ll see you next time Career Warrior Podcast. And before you go, remember if you’re not seeing the results you want in your job search, our highly trained team of professional resume writers here at, Let’s Eat, Grandma can help head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast/ to get a free resume critique and $70 off any one of our resume writing packages. We talk all the time on the show about the importance of being targeted in your job search and with our unique writing process and focus on individual attention, you’ll get a resume cover letter and LinkedIn profile that are highly customized and tailored to your goals to help you get hired faster. Again, head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast/ Thanks, and I’ll see you next time.