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The mere hassle of writing one helped weed out lackluster job candidates, discouraging those without the adequate skills or enthusiasm from throwing their hats in the ring.
Just as the job market flooded with freshly-graduated and newly laid-off tech workers, generative AI arrived on the scene. Now, as jobseekers increasingly rely on platforms like ChatGPT to spit out cover letters that tick off all the right keywords, hiring managers must wade through an ever-deepening pool of applications that read more or less alike.
The shift could be interpreted as leveling the playing field for otherwise strong applicants with less-developed writing skills, or those communicating in their non-native language. However, new research shows that the rise of AI-generated cover letters may be causing good candidates to fall through the cracks while lowering wages for all.
For some engineering leaders, the solution is simple: It’s time to replace cover letters for good.
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The end of authenticity
“When you see 50 cover letters and 40 of them sound like they were written by the same machine, it stops being a useful signal,” says David Berwick, the director of the global tech-recruitment agency Adria Solutions.
Berwick explains that, until recently, he turned to cover letters for a sense of a candidate’s personality and passions. The letters weren’t always beautifully written, but they offered a glimpse into the potential teammate and problem-solver beyond the CV. Now, most of what lands in his inbox reads uncannily the same: “Same wording, same structure, same ‘I am excited to apply’ tone.” He rarely bothers to review them unless the candidate’s CV already stands out.
Berwick’s observations were echoed by a dozen tech hiring managers, engineering recruiters, and legal experts who work with jobseekers across industries. They each tell LeadDev that the homogeneity of cover letters has made them virtually meaningless for employers looking to make informed staffing decisions.
Research suggests that workers pay the steepest price. In their new study of Freelancer.com jobs data, the economists Anaïs Galdin and Jesse Silbert found that before LLMs, a strong cover letter earned freelancers a significant earnings boost when hired. Post-AI, platform wages are now an estimated 5% lower across the board, hiring is 1.5% lower, and employers more often hire poorer candidates. The study’s authors surmise that, in a world where AI-generated cover letters make it harder for employers to distinguish between good candidates and weak ones, all jobseekers are being penalized – especially the most talented among them.
This cover-letter conundrum is playing out amid a broader crisis of confidence in the impact of AI on hiring. Greenhouse’s new 2025 AI in Hiring report shows that 91% of US hiring managers and 89% in Europe have “caught or suspected AI-driven candidate misrepresentation.” That wariness extends to candidates’ letters of intent.
“AI didn’t just change the way I read cover letters, but it changed the way I trust them,” says Pragya Keshap, a software development and engineering tech lead in the financial services sector. Keshap, who is based in Austin, used to spend hours writing cover letters, hoping to convey what excited her about a particular role. Reading cover letters as a hiring manager, she looked for that same sense of authenticity, “even if the writing wasn’t perfect.” Now, in the age of AI, Keshap has seen those glimmers of humanity all but disappear from cover letters, rendering them effectively meaningless as hiring tools.
“There is a real argument for retiring them, at least in technical fields,” she says.
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Putting human skills first
As the traditional cover letter falls out of favor, hiring managers are turning toward more concrete measures of candidates’ aptitude.
“Basically cover letters are dead and skills assessments are in,” says Vikas Aditya, the Portland, Oregon-based CEO of HackerEarth, an enterprise hiring platform for engineering talent. The company screens candidates using an online test with multiple-choice questions and a short coding task, which are then automatically evaluated to surface strong applicants.
HackerEarth’s testing approach isn’t entirely new. Aditya points out that top tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce, have long incorporated skills assessments in their hiring processes. A correlation between professional skill-testing and higher long-term job performance is also well supported by research.
Paul DeMott, the Cincinnatti-based CTO for Helium SEO, argues that companies should do away with AI keyword filters that “reward the candidate for producing marketing language rather than for demonstrating real engineering skill. Instead, DeMott suggests giving job applicants a precise technical assessment prompt that would be difficult to drum up with ChatGPT.
“For example, as part of the hiring team, we might ask an applicant to describe his design process for a recent database schema optimization that saved a system more than 200 milliseconds in query time,” DeMott says. “This granular question requires an answer that is based on practical experience of implementation. This filtering mechanism immediately narrows the pool of applications to people who have produced real results.”
For jobseekers, DeMott advises a refocus of attention away from the cover letter and onto “unfakeable evidence” of their software-developing chops. “They should make a special section at the top of their resume or the application form that links to their public code repository or a live project demo,” he says.
Berwick, the Adria Solutions director, similarly recommends that candidates make the effort to tell a genuine story about who they are and why they’re right for the job. “Talk about real examples. Mention actual work you did. That alone puts you ahead of most applicants.”
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He adds that hiring managers, in turn, should “stop weighing the letter so heavily” and focus on an applicant’s CV, small work samples, GitHub commits, and how they explain a problem. “Those things still show the human behind the application,” Berwick says.
Keshap, the engineering tech lead, also believes that the onus falls on hiring teams to ask better questions of their prospective hires instead of “trying to read authenticity into a template.”
“If cover letters stay, they need to be more human, more honest, and more focused on experience than keywords,” Keshap says. “Otherwise, we should stop pretending they help us make better decisions.”
