The purpose of a covering letter is to give the reader an overview of who you are, what you are applying for and why you think you would be good at the job. Always try and send a covering letter with your CV unless it states specifically not to, as this is your chance to highlight something on your CV which may be missed if they scan read it.

A covering letter should be short and to the point. Many potential employers have not got the time to read through lots of CV’s with pages and pages of covering letters. You do not need to mention hobbies, irrelevant qualifications or courses etc on your covering letter, it should be kept very specific to the job you are applying for.

Your cover letter is often viewed as an example of your writing skills and it may well be scrutinised for spelling and grammar mistakes. If an employer receives a large amount of CV’s they may even disregard anyone who has spelling mistakes in the covering letter as a way of narrowing the potentially successful applicants down.

You may want to use bullet points and short sentences on your CV as time is precious and some employers will simply not read it if it is too long.