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The labor market, like many
other sectors, is dealing with the influence coming from
artificial intelligence. And one
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component of the labor scenario
that is changing is how people go about promoting themselves to
get a job, things like the old
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fashioned cover letter. Judd
Kessler is Professor of Business, Economics and Public Policy here
at the Wharton School. He's also
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author of the book <i>Lucky By
Design</i>. He wrote recently about the cover letter going away, and
he joins us right now. Judd,
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this is an interesting topic,
and I guess, like many things in life, even the cover letter
changes over a period of time.
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It's been around for hundreds of
years. So it's— you know, dates back to the 15, 1600s, that era.
But you know, technology
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changes. And what is a useful
signal of your interest in a firm and your fit for a firm, it
changes as technology changes.
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Right. And obviously, in this day and
age of artificial intelligence, I would imagine it becomes a lot
easier to write a very good
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cover letter because you have
that extra assistance. Yeah, and this is the problem. I
mean, it's a little
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counterintuitive. We made this
thing very easy to write, and now it's not useful anymore. But
that's exactly how signals work
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in the labor market. So you
know, to paint the picture, right, this is what we're trying
to achieve with a cover letter.
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We're trying to both show the
employer that we are a good catch, that we're high quality,
that we're producing high level
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work, and we're also trying to
signal to them that we are actually interested in this job.
And one of the reasons that
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second one is so important is
it's become very easy to apply to many jobs at once. So a job
application that you send to a
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firm, you might be sending out
1000 applications like that. So the firm has to decide, is this
person worth investing time and
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energy in evaluating? If we
recruit them, are they actually going to want to be here? Are
they going to be looking over
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their shoulder for their next
opportunity? And a good, well thought out detailed cover
letter used to provide that
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assurance, because it was hard
to write, and you couldn't write a thoughtful, detailed, tailored
cover letter to every employer.
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You only sent those to the ones
you really, really cared about. and that's just not true
anymore.
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So let's circle back here for a
second. You talk about the component of signals. And I
guess when you're going for a
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job, the cover letter is one of
the signals that shows that you're extremely interested
about this position. You think
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you would be a great candidate
for this position. That's kind of been the historic norm of
what a cover letter was supposed
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to do, correct?
- Exactly. And so that's—
and the reason it was a good signal, the reason that
when a firm received a
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thoughtful, detailed cover
letter, they could be confident that you really were a good fit
for the firm, believed the firm
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was a good fit for you, was that
it was hard to write a cover letter like that. If it took
hours to research the firm,
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figure out exactly what they
were doing, what they needed, and how you fit in, then, you
know— if it took hours to do
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that, the firm could be
confident that you weren't writing letters like that to
every place you applied. You
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were— you were selecting the
places that were actually good fits for you. But if ChatGPT
or Claude Code or whatever your
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preferred AI— generative AI
model is can write hundreds of those letters in a matter of
seconds, then the firm that
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receives that no longer can be
confident that you actually want to work there. They— you
know, they might believe that
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you're sending letters like that
to all the places you apply, and you very well might be.
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So you actually suggest that the
component of the job recommendation may become even
more important as we move
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forward here.
- Yeah. I mean, the question is, what is
going to be a useful signal for
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the labor market to identify
folks who are really good fits? And I should say, you know, I'm
not just— when I wrote my book, I
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was kind of speculating that
this would happen, but there's data coming out that is showing
exactly this. That when
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platforms, labor market
platforms, introduce AI tools to help people write their cover
letters, the cover letters get
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more tailored. They get more
detailed, and, you know, better fit matches— look like there
is a better fit between the
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applicant and the job posting.
And those cover letters are better. They're
successful, but the firms that
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are looking for candidates stop
paying as much attention to them. They kind of recognize,
"Oh, I'm getting a lot
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of these," and the cover letter
becomes less important. What becomes more important? Well,
the signals that are not as easy
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for a candidate to generate with
AI. Things like your prior work experience and recommendations
from prior employers or other
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people who know you well, that
might be written by AI. There's nothing wrong with having the
letter of recommendation be
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written by AI, because the
actual signal is not that the letter is good. The actual
signal is that you got somebody
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to write the letter on your
behalf, that somebody out there in the real world believes you
are a good fit for this firm.
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So should the— for those that are
out there looking for jobs, do they bother with the cover
letter at this point, or do you
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make it just about those
recommendations from other companies, other employers? So I think we're in a transition
period where you actually do
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still need the cover letter,
unless a firm stops asking for it, which is where I think we're
going. Eventually the firm will
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realize this is pointless. We're
having AI write these cover letters. And, you know, many
firms now are using AI to read
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the cover letters. And so the
whole— the whole process is a little silly. But right now, the
cover letter is kind of the
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prerequisite. It's no longer the
differentiator, because if you decide not to send a cover
letter, or you send a bad cover
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letter, then the firm has to
think like, "Well, why didn't they send— why didn't they just
put it through one of these
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generative AI models? It's so
easy to write a good cover letter, they must really not
care, if they're not bothering to
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even do that, even do the kind
of lowest-cost thing of having AI write a good cover
letter for you. So yeah, I think
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we're still in a time when we
need to send a good quality cover letter, but I think you
can be confident that the firm's
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not really looking at them. And later
on, you know, this won't be necessary.
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You also talk in your article
about the importance of networking and how that kind of
plays into— obviously, people
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have done networking for a long
period of time, but how does that get impacted by this shift
that's going on?
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Yeah. The issue is when AI
comes and makes a lot of the signals that we used to send
less costly, easier to send,
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then the signals that will take
over are going to be ones that are happening in the real world.
It's kind of this great irony of
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AI, is that we're making things
online just so easy, anything that a computer can aid you with
has become very, very easy to
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do. And so the signals that will
be effective are ones that cannot be replicated by AI. That
are in the real world. And so
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when I find somebody at a firm
and offer to take them to coffee and spend half an hour with
them, chatting with them, that
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is a signal that I'm interested
in the firm. That is a relationship that I am building
that cannot be replicated with
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AI. And as a result, those types
of relationships are going to become more important. And if
what is happening is that the
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cover letters or the referrals—
oh, sorry, the letters of recommendation or the referrals
are going to replace the cover
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letters, well, then, having more
interpersonal connections, having more relationships,
having more folks who are
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willing to go to bat for you, is
going to be all the more powerful. Is this just another— another
change for the HR department
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that's going through an
incredible swirl of change right now? I think they're gonna settle on
this. I think, you know, when you
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are flooded by hundreds or 1000s
of applicants for each position that you have open, and they're
getting better and better, and
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you're having trouble sorting
through them, right, you're going to need to figure out,
what is the alternative way that
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I'm going to cut through this
noise? And I think that HR firms are getting there, and you see
it in the data from the papers
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that are coming out looking at
this. But yeah. It's— it's a period of change. I do not envy
those folks. But it's—
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it's going to get better once
they figure out, what are the signals that actually are
informative in this—
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in this market today. Judd, always great to chat.
Thanks again for your time, sir.
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Thanks so much for having me. Thank you. Judd Kessler, Professor of Business, Economics
and Public Policy here at the
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Wharton School.