Nobody likes job-hunting. Nearly every part of it is tedious and demoralizing: squinting at hiring portals, brushing up your resume, and figuring out the right bit of corporate-speak that will impress an interviewer without making you come across as desperate. And that’s before the rejections start rolling in.
One of the most-loathed parts of a roundly loathed process is writing a cover letter, the short statement that you attach to your resume to explain why you want the job and would be good at it.
The cover-letter-and-resume pairing has been a professional norm for the better part of a century, but in the age of AI (and the hyper-competitive job market that many applicants face in 2026), many people are starting to push back against it.3
How necessary is writing a cover letter for each job application, really? Is this an outdated tradition?
For that matter, do recruiters and hiring managers even still read these things at all?




