Who likes writing a cover letter? Putting pen to paper to bow and scrape to one’s future employer is one of the things we French people hate the most… in an era where the art of prose excites us as much as filling out a tax return, these mandatory convolutions irritate all generations of candidates, except perhaps, a little less, the most ancient among us, who were, at one time, raised on handwriting. Fine. But a study has just revealed a strange thing.
Two academics looked at cover letters and data from the Freelancer.com platform, and what they discovered will surprise you (or not). First, the first finding: everyone uses AI to get rid of this painful exercise. The unequivocal result is that cover letters are longer and better written. Unsurprisingly: employers are not fooled. Our two researchers themselves used an AI tool to score the value of these letters, and this value increased.
Everything could be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, but this sudden elevation of the candidates’ literary level has a drawback: all the letters are the same and no longer signify anything to recruiters other than their authors’ ability to write a prompt. Everything they could decipher in them—from the candidates’ aspirations and motivation, to their ability to articulate a discourse, to construct an argument, or to express their personality—all of that has suddenly disappeared, like a bad special effect in a Japanese B-movie.
In a learned sentence, we therefore learn that while the writing quality of cover letters has increased thanks to AI, their value in the eyes of employers has become so low that the latter tend to turn to other signals to further their analysis.
This matter reveals once again that AI is always a double-edged sword: it can be a formidable tool for those who can use it as a skill they already master, but a trap for those who use AI to completely replace a skill.
