Cover Letter Examples That Get Interviews (2026 Templates)
Most cover letters are boring filler. Here are examples and a three-paragraph framework that actually convince hiring managers to read your resume.
Do Cover Letters Still Matter?
Short answer: for about 40% of jobs, yeah. Hiring managers still read them, especially for competitive roles, career changers, communication-heavy positions, and any job where you're underqualified on paper.
The cover letter is your chance to explain the story behind your resume. Your resume says what you did. The cover letter says why it matters.
The Three-Paragraph Framework
Forget the five-paragraph essay from school. Modern cover letters are three paragraphs max:
Paragraph 1: The Hook (2-3 sentences)
Why this company, why this role, why now. Be specific.
Bad:
"I am writing to express my interest in the Software Engineer position at your company."
Good:
"When I saw that Stripe is building a new fraud detection pipeline, I got genuinely excited. I spent the last two years building exactly this at [Company]: a real-time ML pipeline that cut false positives by 60%."
Paragraph 2: The Proof (3-5 sentences)
Match 2-3 of their requirements to your experience. Include numbers.
"Your posting mentions needing someone who can own a service end-to-end. At [Company], I built and maintained a microservice handling 2M requests/day with 99.95% uptime. I also led a team of 3 engineers to ship a feature that boosted conversion by 15%, from spec to production in 6 weeks."
Paragraph 3: The Close (2 sentences)
Reiterate interest. Suggest next steps.
"I'd love to discuss how my experience with real-time data systems could help accelerate Stripe's fraud detection roadmap. I'm available for a call any time this week."
Full Example: Software Engineer
Dear Hiring Team,
Building developer tools that reduce friction is what gets me out of bed in the morning, so when I saw Vercel's posting for a Frontend Infrastructure Engineer, I had to apply. Your work on Turbopack has been on my radar since Next.js Conf.
At [Current Company], I've spent 3 years on build tooling and developer experience. I migrated our monorepo from Webpack to Vite, cutting build times from 4 minutes to 22 seconds. That's a 10x improvement that directly impacted how fast our team ships. I also built an internal component library used by 40+ engineers, which cut new feature development time by roughly 30%.
I'd love to chat about how I could contribute to Vercel's infrastructure team. Available any time this week.
Best, [Name]
Mistakes People Keep Making
- Starting with "I am writing to apply..." Boring. Skip it entirely.
- Repeating the resume. They can read it themselves.
- Going too long. 250-400 words max. If your cover letter has a scroll bar, it's too long.
- Not mentioning the company by name. Dead giveaway that you're mass-applying.
- Using filler language. "I am a passionate and dedicated professional" sounds like a robot wrote it.
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Last updated: February 2026