by: Joanne Meehl

The following is a cover letter to an employer that appeared on an email discussion list when the writer clicked Reply All instead of Reply, to a friend with whom he was sharing the letter. He should have kept it to himself and not even to the person he really meant to send it to. I left the "letter" to the employer exactly as it was written.

A friend of mine forwarded this to me and I feel that it would be a challenging and exciting career opportunity for me. I have an Associates of Science, E-Commerce as well as a recent BA, Business & Marketing degree. My current position is a Marketing Manager for a medical software company and I am responsible for all of the design and creation of marketing sell sheets, flyers, press releases, website updates, social media feeds, google analytic reports and much more. ?Please review my resume, I am very confident that this would be a great fit and I would greatly welcome the opportunity to talk with you regarding this position.

Kind Regards,

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Can you tell what job it's for? No. How can we tell when there's no reference to it, even by title?

Second, can we tell how this person matches the job? No, he just goes on about his background whether it's relevant or not. The whole point of a cover letter/cover email is to match you to the job, point by point, which he does not do.

Third, it's about him. There's nothing at all about the employer's needs.

There are incomplete sentences. And typos galore.can you count the typos? Job hunters tire of advisors like me saying "Don't allow any typos", but this sample shows why we keep bringing it up.

I don't know if he ever got an interview.

It's highly unlikely given this first impression.

P. S.: Here's where people say, "Don't bother writing a cover letter, they won't read it". Half the experts I follow say that, the other half say, "Write them!" The first half are talking about letters like this one. No wonder they don't get read! The second half are talking about good cover letters that match you to the job. So I recommend writing them - better to have one that's expected, than to assume you don't need it.

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