Everybody Hates Cover Letters. Do We Really Need Them in 2026?

The idea behind submitting a cover letter is that it can give hiring managers a better sense of your personality than a resume, which is usually a fairly impersonal list of career accomplishments.

Certain conventions have evolved around how cover letters are written. Most consist of three to four paragraphs that feature:

• A brief self-introduction
• A note about how much you’re excited about the opportunity you’re applying for, and why
• A few sentences about why you’re the perfect candidate for the job
• A polite sign-off reiterating that you’re excited and hope to hear back

Theoretically, job seekers are supposed to customize their cover letters for each job they apply for, or even write a fresh one from scratch. (In that, these differ from other application materials—many people have slightly different resumes for different types of jobs, but few customize theirs for every single role.)

Not all job ads instruct applicants to submit a cover letter, but many do, as in the screenshot from the Side Hustles job board below.

In white-collar fields, even when it isn’t a hard requirement, it’s often still an unstated expectation.

It’s no secret that by and large, the workers of the world despise these documents.

“Very few people have ever told me they enjoy writing cover letters,” the journalist Andrew Seaman wrote on LinkedIn. In a popular post in the Reddit community r/jobsearchhacks, one online commenter characterized them as “annoying, time consuming, and a waste of time.”

When people vent about cover letters, their complaints tend to hit a few notes:

They’re formulaic

The de facto rules about what cover letters are supposed to contain mean that they don’t actually give applicants much of an opportunity to convey their personalities.

This can leave these letters feeling like a formality that can’t possibly offer much value to either side. Even some hiring professionals are coming to share this view; Megan Houle, who has worked as an executive recruiter for over two decades, told us that cover letters have “become a checkbox in an outdated system.”

They don’t always get read

Perhaps because cover letters are so formulaic, many applicants suspect recruiters and hiring managers don’t actually read them, at least not with any real attention.

Houle bluntly confirmed this. “Hiring managers are not sitting there reading 500 heartfelt essays,” she said. “They’re scanning, skimming, or skipping entirely.”

Her assertion is backed by a fair amount of research, including one 2022 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology that was later popularized by Indie Hackers.1 The study found that hiring managers spend an average of just 35 seconds skimming each cover letter they receive.

Some of the other recruiters we talked to put forward even smaller figures—often under 10 seconds—and several admitted to ignoring them entirely.

They’re time-consuming to write

Both of those issues are especially frustrating because writing cover letters can be an enormous time sink for job seekers.

Allison Green, who runs the workplace advice blog Ask a Manager, wrote in 2011 that she was a “huge proponent” of customized cover letters, and that she recommended applicants spend “no more than 20 minutes” on each one. At the time, that advice was fairly reasonable.

However, the job market has changed since then.

In 2026, hiring is heavily stacked against most candidates. In March, The New York Times called the past year of job growth “anemic,” and in January, NPR observed that many applicants are “sending out hundreds of applications” and hearing “nothing back,” concluding that the job market was “broken.”

The outlook is particularly bleak for Gen Z workers and other recent grads.

There are several reasons for this, including sluggish growth in many sectors of the economy and the aftereffects of pandemic-era overhiring, but the upshot is that it often takes job seekers dozens or hundreds of tries to land one interview, to say nothing of actually getting an offer.2

It doesn’t take a mathematician to see how the numbers work out. Even if a cover letter takes “no more than twenty minutes” to prepare, if you have to send out a hundred to land a job, you’re looking at over 30 hours spent on just this one aspect of the job-hunting process.

Given how frustrating all this is (and how little time recruiters actually spend reading cover letters), many people are openly questioning whether applicants should bother submitting them at all.

Many of the posters in Reddit’s r/jobsearchhacks thread claimed they’ve simply stopped doing so. “I don’t write cover letters unless it’s a job I really actually care about,” wrote the top commenter. Another responded to the question, “Why do we still write them?” with a blunt, “We don’t. At least, I don’t.”

Although that attitude is good for scoring points with burnt-out workers, a few posters took a more cautious stance.

Notably, a representative of ResumeGenius, a popular resume-creation service, replied to the thread and warned, “If an employer asks for a cover letter, you pretty much need to submit one.” Otherwise, they said, the company might simply jettison your application.

An earlier survey by ResumeGenius claimed that the majority of hiring managers still consider cover letters “important”—even though over half admitted to not reading them.

The mainstream consensus: you can’t opt out just yet

Disappointingly for fed-up job seekers, most experts seem to agree that it’s a bad idea to go rogue and refuse to submit a cover letter if an application asks for one.

In 2025, Joel Schwartzberg proclaimed in the Harvard Business Review that “cover letters still matter” and wrote that he was “always surprised” when he ran into candidates who disdained them.

Joseph Liu, a writer for Forbes, concurred, writing that, “If the option exists to include one and you opt out … you risk coming across as a candidate who simply didn’t put in the time or effort to go the extra mile.”

This is the “game theory” of cover letters. It’s dangerous to stop submitting them unless you know that everybody else will do the same.

The situation next year might look very different.

Many recruiters are beginning to acknowledge something that may strike a fatal blow against the cover letter tradition: the impact of generative AI.

These days, it’s trivial to instantly create a cover letter by uploading your resume to an AI model and giving it a few instructions.

Several companies have also created dedicated cover letter generator web apps, with one of the most popular being Cover Letter Copilot. Most run on major LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, but have interfaces to guide users through the process.

In the relatively short period since ChatGPT’s release kicked off the AI age, machine-written cover letters have become extremely common.

Side Hustles contacted several recruiters, and virtually all confirmed this. Lungelo Nkosi of Darwin Recruitment, a STEM staffing firm, called AI letters “very widespread.”

Several estimated that AI accounted for about half of the cover letters they saw, and others went even further. “I would confidently say a significant majority of cover letters coming through right now are either fully AI-generated or heavily AI-assisted,” Megan Houle told us.

Do cover letters mean anything in the age of AI?

When a huge proportion of cover letters are written by AI instead of the candidates who submitted them, they lose what little remaining value they had as a signal of the qualities recruiters look for, like professionalism and enthusiasm.

A March 2026 headline in The Times asserted that “the cover letter is dead” thanks to AI.

“Cover letters are not worth much any more,” Timo Lehne, the head of a UK staffing company, was quoted as saying. “I think they are irrelevant.”

Matt Collingwood, the managing director of VIQU IT Recruitment, another UK-based recruitment firm, told us that the shift has been dramatic enough that many hiring software platforms no longer even store cover letters when applicants attach them—just resumes.

This means that in some cases, not only will recruiters not read your cover letter, they wouldn’t be able to read it even if they wanted to.

This doesn’t mean you don’t have to submit a cover letter (yet)

Unfortunately, the situation isn’t quite as simple as “AI killed cover letters, so you don’t have to bother with them ever again.”

Not all of the recruiters we talked to agreed that they’d become obsolete. Nkosi told us he still sometimes references them, especially when he gets a resume that looks promising but is “vague and that [doesn’t] highlight the important key points.” Often, he said, the cover letter will mitigate this.

Jon Hill of the recruiting firm The Energists told us that the importance of a cover letter varies widely from job to job. For technical jobs, they’re less likely to matter, but they can be a big deal for communication-focused roles. They also matter for candidates who are “transitioning from another industry” or have anything else they need to explain, like an employment gap.

Put more simply—albeit frustratingly—it might be the case that cover letters usually don’t matter and their days are, in fact, numbered.

However, the times when they’re important remain common enough that it’s still a good idea to submit one, anyway.

If most workers hate writing cover letters and AI is in the process of killing them, is there any reason why everybody shouldn’t start using AI to churn them out?

Some people, of course, have ethical qualms with using AI, but if we set those aside, can most people in hiring even tell the difference between an AI and human-written letter?

Here, the recruiters we spoke to had varying takes. The most common response was: sometimes.

Telltale patterns in AI cover letters

Language models like ChatGPT and Gemini have distinctive writing styles, at least when they aren’t carefully prompted to avoid them, and some of their quirks are well-known.

Hill told us that some people probably overlook AI cover letters, but that “experienced recruiters” are usually good at spotting “AI voice.”

“Letters written by AI are usually generic and feel oddly detached from the specifics of the candidate’s work history,” he said. “When a letter is polished and well-written but seems like it’s interchangeable with any other applicant, that’s when my AI radar pings.”

Nkosi also pointed out AI’s infamous tendency to “hallucinate.” While this has grown less severe since ChatGPT was first released, it’s still a problem.

If a letter contains information that isn’t a “true reflection of the candidate,” he said, it puts the whole job application at risk of disqualification.

Theory meets practice: testing a popular cover letter generator

Side Hustles tested Cover Letter Copilot, one of the most commonly recommended AI generators, and found that most of these concerns were merited.

We fed the app a real resume and hypothetical job description for a copy editing position at SideHustles.com. We requested a letter with a moderate level of formality (the second of three available options: “Professional,” “Modern,” and “Friendly”).

The output was readable, but had several serious problems.

Echoing Hill’s concerns about vagueness, several sentences were superficially polished but lacked any concrete details from the resume we attached.

The letter was also full of corporate jargon (“I thrive in environments where collaboration meets rapid execution”), which several recruiters had noted they weren’t impressed by.

Worse, the generator misinterpreted the resume we attached, resulting in the cover letter somewhat underselling the experience we listed—”hundreds of articles” became “over 100 articles.”

Our verdict was that Copilot’s output would probably stand up to a quick skim, but that many skilled recruiters would probably notice its flaws and be able to tell that it was AI.

Is it possible to get AI to do better?

Although we weren’t impressed by the most popular AI cover letter generator, we constructed our own prompt to see if these problems were avoidable or if the technology just wasn’t there yet.

We stressed to the AI to pull concrete details from the attached resume and avoid common “AI-isms,” such as excessive adjectives. We also instructed it to confirm with the user whether it was interpreting ambiguous information correctly.

After running several tests with both GPT 5.5 and Gemini 3, we found that our prompt’s output was less obviously AI-produced and that it avoided the pitfalls that Copilot fell into.

This matched what several of the recruiters told us: using AI can be risky, but isn’t necessarily a terrible idea as long as you’re willing to carefully prompt it (and edit the results, if need be). The technology hasn’t quite reached the point yet where you can take a “fire and forget” approach.

“Using AI isn’t the risk,” said Houle. “Using it lazily is.”

There’s a middle ground between writing each cover letter from scratch—something that just isn’t realistic in 2026’s job market—and fully generating each one with AI.

“You can start from an AI-generated draft, then personalize it selectively,” said Hill. He suggested spending more time on the opening paragraph to explain why you’re interested in the role, then adding one or two “specific examples of how you align” with it elsewhere in the letter.

“Everything else can be templated or AI-generated,” he said, “but having a few personalized touches helps.”

Several people on r/jobsearchhacks said they did the same, keeping the body of their cover letter mostly unchanged from application to application but slightly tweaking the beginning or end. It’s possible to do this either manually or with AI.

If you take the latter approach, one poster recommended feeding your chosen AI model examples of your past writing so that it can mimic your style.

What the future holds for the cover letter convention

AI is improving every day, and some of the recruiters we spoke to said the current balance is likely to change before too long.

“[AI tools] are improving,” said Hill, “and candidates are getting better at prompting them … I expect that within a couple of years it will be very difficult to detect AI-generated letters based on writing style alone.”

When that day comes, the cover letter tradition may finally die, something that will elicit a sigh of relief from the millions of people who despise it. But while that’s visible on the horizon, we aren’t quite there yet.

For now, the most practical approach to creating cover letters may be to walk a line between full customization and full automation. For some struggling job seekers, that might be the only viable approach in a job market that forces them to fire off dozens of applications to land a single interview.