this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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Abuse me harder, Corpo Daddy 🫦
Congratulations, you've passed the vibe check.
I get that the grind looking for a job can be tough.
As a small business with just 3 or 4 staff hiring is also tough.
Hiring the wrong person is very, very costly.
I dont think that asking for confirmation that an applicant has read the job advert is "abuse", but if you do then there's no need to apply I guess.
It’s not just your small business though. It’s Every. Single. Application.
Could I use a template? Actually probably not as more and more businesses are asking for specifics in the cover letters to combat templates and AI use.
To the business owner it’s only a few minutes to write cover letter, but when people are applying for dozens of jobs a day, that all ask for unique responses, and quizzes, and forms that are identical to the CV you are required to upload, it gets very hard to write an even vaguely inspired response to “why do you want to sell kebabs out of my food truck for minimum wage?”
I can't speak for food truck guy but in a way part of the reason for cover letters is that they discourage drive bys like that. A bit like a bot test for visiting a website these days. "Do a little extra to prove you're real".
I totally understand that people work in exchange for money, but there's loads of places you can work for money. As the employer there's an advantage in hiring a person that specifically wants to work for me, or at least employers like me.
That means, candidates that reviewed 24 job postings and applied for the 6 which are more desirable to them, are the candidates which are much more desirable to me. People that just want a job and any job will do are obviously less desirable.
A template is fine, and kind of expected honestly.
Dude, there are millions of fake job offerings out there just looking to scrape data. You have to send out hundreds of applications just to get to one or two genuine offers. With the addition of mandatory bespoke cover letters, looking for a job becomes more work than an actual full time job.
What would you like me to do about that, as an employer?
I thought it was pretty fuckin obvious what the other people are saying, but I suppose being an out of touh moron is a requirement to be an employer. Realize the struggle people face and how shitty the job searching economy is and get over yourself. Stop asking for cover letters
LOL.
One of us certainly is an out of touch moron.
You probably didn't see my other comment where I said I don't insist on cover letters, but without one I need to ask more screening questions.
Regardless, my comment here is pointing out that, as a legit employer I can't do anything about fake job offerings, nor the grind.
As an aside, it's been a long while since I hired someone who was unemployed. I certainly don't think I've hired someone who is so busy sending out applications they can't take a moment to write a cover letter. Make of that what you will.
So, you say you aren't out of touch and then immediately describe how out of touch you are
I have 10 years of experience in my field and two difficult certifications where even one is uncommon and highly desired. I am a prime hire. When my company got out bid and had to lay off the entire workforce, it still took me almost 7 months to get rehired and that was with sending an average of roughly 40 applications out every day. I used my entire savings and my partner had to dip into theirs to supplement rent in that time. The single one that called me back ended up hiring me during the interview.
Now, let's do a little math since your terminal victim brain can't seem to empathize with people less lucky than you got in life: assume a quick and decent personalized letter only takes 10 minutes. Not so bad, right? For 40 applications, that's 400 minutes divided by 60 (the number of minutes in an hour) and you get 6.66 repeating. Nearly 6 and a half hours per day just doing a 'quick letter' and you're complaining that you have to ask a couple more questions during an interview, where you're still making money. You're right that one of us is definitely an out of touch fucking moron and it sure as hell isn't me
Headhunting is a completely different process.
I'm not headhunting.
Stop asking for cover letters.
Do interviews then. Cover letters discourages the real people whereas the"drive bys", as you called them, will just crap something out with AI in 2 seconds.
Asking for interviews also shows you're as invested in finding a good match for an employee as the employee is in finding a good boss.
Interviews take a lot of time and resources. We're hiring someone presently and interviews will take an hour for myself and two staff for each candidate. We've decided to interview 10 candidates.
So does finding a job.
People spend months looking for a job, full time with no pay, and you're here complaining that you need to spend a few days interviewing people, for which you're being paid since it's your job.
The business is not being paid for allocating resources to the hiring process.
I have been on the job hunt side of things. I applied for +50 jobs in a week with unique cover letters and CVs catered to the fields I am applying for. I have qualifications and experience in the fields I was applying to.
I got three responses.
One was a scam. Another was a 2 week temp job with “the opportunity for further work”. So another scam. The last one was the only legitimate offer I received, and it paid the minimum amount it could under the award.
I can empathise with an employer not wanting to sift through AI submissions or fly bys, but all they’ve done is turn that back onto applicants. Then they act entitled when people don’t want to jump through their hoops and say stupid shit like “if you can’t write a cover letter maybe this isn’t the job for you”
Sure, I am going to take unpaid time to write your little essay to pass your paternalistic test. "Oh it should only take a couple of minutes to write", I hear you say. It would also only take a couple of minutes to talk to me. Must not be serious about working with peers.
Oh man.
I'm hiring right now. I've had more than 100 applicants and spent about 2 days reviewing them and asking screening questions in chat.
I didn't reject any on the basis that they did not provide a cover letter, but in those cases I did need to ask more questions to try to get some idea of who the candidate was.
It takes a lot more than a couple of minutes to talk to someone. Even short interviews take a minimum of 30 minutes because I need to arrange a time, then talk, then make some notes. I'd say an hour is more reasonable estimate.
I'm not quite sure what that jab about working with peers means.
I understand your situation might involve dealing with countless asshole corporations who are intent on exploiting you, but it's a mistake to conclude that every employer the world over is the same.
Nah, that's a 100% correct assessment. Every single employer is looking to exploit someone's labor by paying them a fraction of the value they generate. That's where your profit comes from.
To that end, every employer will, to one degree or another, deliberately make their hiring process more difficult than it needs to be tonweed out anyone not sufficiently desperate to accept whatever ridiculous low-ball offer the employer intends to make.
I get it, you didn't invent capitalism or wage labor, but you're sure as hell profiting from it. So pretending you're doing the people you exploit a favor or that your time is more valuable than that of the people you exploit is more than just a little rich.
Honestly there are way less annoying and time consuming ways to do this for you and the applicant, like just including a line in the posting "To confirm you've read the job description, all interested applicants should apply via emailing their resume to x@y.com with the job title and location in the subject line," or something.
Cover letters are complete bullshit as they are currently used. If I were applying to a management role in a niche industry, or something in the C-suite or other positions one would only get after advancing a fair bit in their career, I can understand the point of a cover letter. When the hardware store wants a cover letter for their part-time cashier position or Taco Bell wants one for their shift manager job? They can get fucked, everything relevant to the candidate's suitability for the role ought to already be in their resume, and at that point companies are just seeing who's willing to degrade themselves the most and jump through the most hoops.
When everyone and their dog wants me to write them a cover letter telling them how it's been my lifelong dream to have chance to listen to middle-aged ladies go apeshit over some coupon not scanning right in my new post as a Joann Fabric Cashier (<12 hour per week position), I cannot be bothered with it. At this point, it's become so stupidly widespread beyond roles where it would actually be useful, I refuse to write them on principal and just assume that if a company rejected my application on that basis, they're the sort of clueless people I wouldn't want to work for anyway.
I think the better alternative since it won't kill application flows, is have a field somewhere saying that they need to mention the title of the job in a field that doesn't make sense what it actually is,
such as have a duplicate middle name field, but specify in the job description that the second middle name field should be what the jobs listed title is.
To someone who didn't read the job applicant, they would think that an error was made creating the job posting, but to anyone who bothered to read it they would know the second field is intended to be the verification process.
Anyone who doesn't supply the job title (case insensitive all special chars like trailing whitespace and ' removed) as the second field just gets auto rejected