Spring's useless ritual

When we greet, we shake hands. An odd custom, if you think about it: a transfer of bacteria used to provide a positive introduction to someone. It is an absolute waste of time; a mere formality that tells you nothing about the person whose hand you are shaking -- unless it's done wrong, in which case you automatically dismiss Limp Larry and Sweaty Sarah as social retards.

The only redeeming thing about the handshake is that the same formula -- brief and firm -- works with everyone. Imagine how much worse this custom would be if people demanded individual handshakes, customized to their specific tastes and fetishes. And if you don't deliver what they want, you're a social retard.

Enter the cover letter.

Like the handshake, the cover letter is also a mere formality -- completely useless except as a tool to weed out people who do it wrong. And that's fine -- I don't mind formalities. But just like I'd mind wasting time individualizing my handshake to each person I meet, I mind employers expecting cover letters specifically tailored to their companies. A cover letter is extremely limited in value -- and thus not worth the time and effort it takes to individualize it to the employer.

Ask any recruiter and he or she will tell you that the cover letter is the last item examined in any job application. Recruiters are busy people, so they go right for the jugular -- the resume -- and are apt to examine your transcript and SAT scores before they even look at your cover letter. Of course this makes perfect sense. After all, a resume says something meaningful about a person; so do a transcript and standardized test scores.

On the other hand, a cover letter, as we all know, is an exercise in bullshit. It is as meaningless as the glitzy career objective statement that we used to put on our resumes, until people finally realized that "seeking a career which would let me utilize my interpersonal skills and pursue my lifelong passion for investment banking" was not only a lie (no one is passionate about investment banking) but also says absolutely nothing about the applicant. Thus, the career objective soon became a contest in which people try to out-glitz each other with ever-more cliche depictions of their passions and skills. The cover letter has also reached precisely that stage in its life; it is now nothing more than a contest to see who can juggle glittering generalities the best.

Obviously, then, the next logical step is for recruiters to kill the cover letter and admit the obvious: it is meaningless, it is useless, and hell, half the time we don't even look at it, so don't waste your time writing it.

But they won't.

What's keeping the cover letter alive? "I err, therefore I am." That's right: faced with thousands of resumes to sift through, typing and grammar errors often become a convenient way for recruiters to narrow the pile. And certainly there's nothing wrong with that; after all, nobody wants to hire someone who writes letters to "Dear Sir or Madman."

However, there is something wrong with making me spend hours researching your company to come up with the perfect description of why I want to work for you only to scan it for errors to see if I can be easily eliminated. After all, I can't imagine a recruiter being impressed with the fact that I have the Internet skills necessary to look up information on his or her company's Web site and force-fit it to my interests.

Frankly, no matter how much you try, that blurb about how "your company is an especially good fit for me" will always sound fake -- especially if you just replace the company name for each of your cover letters. So no sane recruiter will put much weight on what you say -- except if you spell his or her name wrong, in which case the recruiter will happily toss your resume in the trash.

Yet if acting as an elimination tool is the main purpose of these cover letters, then why put in the extra effort to individualize each one? Surely you can make an error in a generic cover letter as well as you can in a company-tailored one, but if you just give the recruiter a generic cover letter, that makes you look bad. So in the end, you have no choice but to put up with the system.

This, then, is how the cover letter still remains alive. But, like the Soviet Union, it is a highly flawed system whose faults everyone recognizes and whose natural consequence, I hope, will be its eventual demise. Albert Einstein once said that "things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." So let's simplify the process: cut the bullshit and focus on the stuff that really matters: interviews, resumes and quality handshakes.

Cezary Podkul is a junior management and philosophy major in Wharton and the College from Chicago, Ill. Cezary Salad appears on Mondays.

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