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Artificial intelligence is making it easier for job applicants to write cover letters. Tools that are trained on large language models can generate what appears to the applicant as a polished, well-written message that will convince a hiring committee the applicant is most deserving of an interview. But applicants might not realize that employers are reading dozens of these AI-written cover letters that are all the same, even with verbatim sentences taken directly from answer engines like ChatGPT.
Some might consider this a reason to do away with cover letters. Even long before AI use became common, cover letters were seen as a perfunctory activity. They are often seen as the garnish of application materials. The resume or CV is the meat.
The prevalence of AI-generated cover letters is not the death of cover letters — it’s an opportunity for candidates to stand out, especially when trying to persuade employers in higher education.
Why Cover Letters Still Matter
Katharine Stewart sees tremendous value in cover letters and considers them to be “absolutely essential” for higher education searches.
A former professor and senior provost, Stewart served on more than 30 hiring committees for faculty and academic administration positions before founding her own consulting practice. She now leads cover letter workshops and coaches higher education professionals.
“The cover letter is the first opportunity for a search committee to hear your voice and to see the way that you communicate about how you work,” Stewart said. “Your CV or your resume tells people what you do. Your cover letter has to tell people why and how you do it. Now, can AI generate that? Absolutely. It’s a tool that has incredible value. AI has been trained on a lot of professional writing, so the letters it generates can sound very professional. But what matters is the values and the principles that really drive your work and the way that you tell your story.”
Cover letters are more important in higher education because the sector tends to rely on traditional practices and employers are set in their ways of evaluation. But also consider the rigor and breadth that goes into CVs. These documents are expected to be comprehensive, sometimes as many as 20 or 30 pages long for academic professionals. If a search committee is screening dozens of application materials at a time, the cover letter, at least by comparison, is easier to digest, but it’s a more valuable tool for capturing who the candidate is, not just what they did.
“The decision [about] who is going to get a first-round interview is made only on two documents, and for that reason, what I tell my clients is you absolutely must have a cover letter that adds substantial new information to whatever your CV or resume says,” Stewart said.
Combining Inspiration and Information
So, what makes a good cover letter nowadays? Before AI, good cover letters were mainly inspirational packaging for the information presented in a resume or CV. They were an emotional appeal to get an interview. Now, cover letters must do both: persuade with claims and inform with evidence-based stories.
If a job description for a leadership position stresses collaboration, then, of course, the AI everyone is using to write cover letters is going to spit out something like “I am a consensus-based collaborative leader” or similar buzzwords that play off the language in the job posting.
“The difference between a cover letter that’s persuasive and a cover letter that makes people’s eyes glaze over and think, ‘Oh my god, it’s just more AI slop,’ is marrying up [of claims with evidence],” Stewart said. “It’s taking ‘I am a consensus-based collaborative leader’ with a very specific example that is connected to something on your resume. It explains what you did and how you did it that illustrates that consensus. When you can write a really lovely story about how you do that, your voice comes through.”
Example of a Cover Letter Story
Resumes and CVs have, what Stewart calls, “flat, dull lines” that tell people which committees you served on or your journal publications. Cover letters provide opportunities for telling short, concrete stories that bring to life who you are, not just the abstract claims everyone else can make using AI.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t use bullet points on a cover letter. Graphical formatting like bullets and subheads can be effective for appealing to readers who are trained to skim, but what follows them are stories about your values, principles, and beliefs instead of stated facts.
That’s where AI fails most applicants who are using it.
“Those values and principles that are most important to you and that you hope that people see in you, those are the stories you should tell in your cover letter,” Stewart said. “AI falls apart because it can’t tell a vivid story about you.”
Here’s an example of consensus-based collaborative leadership for a cover letter bullet point:
“Consensus-Based Collaborative Leadership: I led a university-wide revision of faculty promotion and tenure guidelines by convening a cross-disciplinary working group of deans, faculty senate leaders, and department chairs. Early in the process, the chair of the Faculty Senate and a humanities professor raised concerns that the proposed metrics overly favored grant-funded research and could disadvantage teaching-focused disciplines. Rather than advancing a top-down proposal, I organized targeted listening sessions with faculty from across colleges and facilitated iterative draft reviews to address those concerns. By incorporating broader definitions of scholarship and teaching impact, the final framework earned strong Faculty Senate support and reflected my commitment to transparency, shared governance, and durable consensus around institutional priorities.”
In Conclusion
In a hiring landscape increasingly crowded with polished but indistinguishable AI-generated prose, the candidates who stand out will be the ones who sound unmistakably human. A strong cover letter does more than echo the language of a job description: It demonstrates how you will serve the institution’s or department’s greatest needs, and It convinces employers, using the power of stories that represent your values and principles, to invite you in for a first-round interview.
AI can help organize ideas or refine phrasing, but it cannot replace the lived experiences that define your professional identity. The most effective cover letters today are the ones that pair clear evidence with a consistent and convictive voice. They show search committees not just what you have done, but why it matters and how you approach your work.
In an era of AI slop, specificity, sincerity, and storytelling are what rise above.
