A cover letter is a second document the same software reads
Most cover letter advice focuses entirely on tone: sound enthusiastic, sound like a fit, don’t sound generic. Almost none of it mentions that the same ATS and AI screener reading your resume usually reads your cover letter too. If your resume is formatted to parse cleanly but your cover letter isn’t, you’ve only fixed half the problem.
Keep the same formatting rules as your resume
Single column, standard fonts, no text boxes or graphics: everything that makes a resume parse cleanly applies to a cover letter too. A cover letter dropped into a fancy graphic template creates the same failure mode as a two-column resume. The parser can’t extract clean text from it, so neither filter ever sees the content you wrote.
Say something the AI screener can score
A cover letter full of “I am excited about this opportunity and believe I would be a great fit” gives an AI screener nothing concrete to score. It skips the action, the number, and the outcome that make a sentence gradable. The same X-Y-Z structure that fixes resume bullets works in a cover letter’s second paragraph: pick your single strongest, most specific accomplishment and state it in one sentence with a real number attached. One sentence like that outweighs three paragraphs of enthusiasm.
Length is a formatting decision too
Keep it to three to four short paragraphs on one page. To either filter, a longer cover letter just means more text to parse, with a lower ratio of scorable content to filler.
Where to start
If you already have a resume with X-Y-Z bullets, reuse your strongest one as the anchor sentence of your cover letter’s second paragraph. You’ve already done the hard part. If you’re starting from scratch, our AI Screener Cheat Sheet covers the X-Y-Z method in full, with a before/after rewrite bank you can apply to cover letter sentences as easily as resume bullets. Browse the full shop for everything currently available.