What belongs in the cover letter, and what belongs on the CV

The two documents answer different questions

A CV answers "what has this person done, and at what level". It is a record: reverse-chronological, scannable, and designed to be read out of order by someone who starts in the middle of page one.

A letter answers "why this role, why this employer, and why now". None of those three questions has a place on a CV, because a CV is the same document for every application and those answers are not.

The test for a paragraph is whether it would survive being sent to a different employer. If it would, it is CV material and the CV is already carrying it. If it would look absurd addressed to anyone else, it belongs in the letter, and it is the reason the letter exists.

The overlap that writes itself

There is a specific, predictable collision between the CV summary and the first paragraph of the letter. Both are written last, both are written from the advert, and both are attempting to position you for the role. Left alone, they converge to the point of near-identical wording, and the reader meets the same three facts twice before reaching anything new.

The person least able to spot this is the person who wrote both, for the reason set out in our piece on a CV repeating itself: rereading your own writing checks the meaning and skips the wording. Open the two files side by side and read only the CV summary and the letter opening, one after the other. The duplication is obvious in five seconds and invisible for weeks otherwise.

What only the letter can carry

These are the things a CV cannot say, either because they are specific to one employer or because a record of what you have done has no natural place to put them.

• Why this employer, specifically — the part of what they do that you have an actual opinion about, not a compliment copied from their homepage.
• The explanation for something the CV makes look odd: a sideways move, a short role, a relocation, a gap, a return after time out, a change of field.
• The requirement you meet by an unusual route. If the advert asks for five years in a sector and you have three plus two years in a closely related one, the CV shows the dates and the letter makes the case.
• Which part of the job you want more of. A CV describes what you were given to do; a letter can say which of it you would choose.
• Logistics that affect a decision: notice period, availability, willingness to relocate, whether you can work the shift pattern the advert names.
• A named referral. "Your senior engineer suggested I apply after we met at the accessibility meetup in March" is a fact worth stating, and there is nowhere on a CV to put it.

What should never leave the CV

The strongest practical argument for the split is that the letter is the file most likely to go missing. Applications get forwarded as attachments, pasted into forms, printed for a panel, or entered into a system by someone who takes the CV and nothing else. The CV is the document that gets stored, circulated and read again three weeks later when someone asks "who was the one with the migration experience?".

So everything a decision depends on stays on the CV, even where the letter also mentions it: employers, job titles, full dates, qualifications, registrations, the evidence of scope, the tools and systems. A CV that only makes sense with the letter beside it is a CV that will be read without it.

• If a fact would be missed by a reader who never opens the letter, it belongs on the CV.
• If a fact is in the letter only, assume it has not been read.
• If the letter contradicts the CV — a different end date, a different job title — the CV is the version that will be checked, and the difference is the thing that gets noticed.

A method that takes about ten minutes

Write the CV first, then let it tell you what the letter is for. Writing them in the other order is how the letter ends up as a narration.

1. Finish the CV for this advert. Do not write a word of the letter yet.
2. Read the CV as a stranger would, in order, and note every point where you would ask "why?" — why that move, why that gap, why this job now. Those questions are the letter's agenda.
3. Write three or four short paragraphs answering only those questions, plus the one thing you have an opinion about in the advert.
4. Reread the CV summary and the letter opening consecutively. If they make the same point, rewrite the letter opening, not the summary.
5. Check that no fact exists only in the letter. Anything that does either moves to the CV or is acknowledged as optional.
6. Keep a copy of both, noting which advert they went to. When someone rings about it, you will want to know what they read.

When there is no letter, only a box

Plenty of application forms have no attachment field for a letter, just a text area labelled "supporting statement" or "anything else you would like us to know". Pasting a formatted letter into it produces a wall of text with a date and an address at the top, which is worse than writing for the box.

Write for the box instead: drop the letterhead conventions, keep the same content, and use short paragraphs. Where the form asks you to address numbered criteria, answer them in the order the form lists them rather than in the order you find most flattering — someone is scoring them in that order.

And check what the form does to your text before submitting. Line breaks and bullet characters pasted from a word processor sometimes arrive as one continuous paragraph, which is a formatting problem you can see and fix in the preview if you look.