Cover letters are dead. Long live the pitch email.

I spent a summer reading cover letters. Not by choice. A friend who runs hiring at a mid-sized agency asked me to help her work through a pile of 340 applications for a senior marketing role.

We read 340 cover letters. We remembered three.

The three we remembered weren't better written than the others. They were shorter, and they were about the company, not the applicant. Everything else was interchangeable. "I was excited to see the position of..." "My background in X has prepared me to..." "I would bring passion and dedication..." After 50 of those, your eyes glaze over. After 200, you start skipping them entirely.

My friend now tells me she hasn't read a cover letter in eighteen months. She has read plenty of emails, though.

The medium is the point

A cover letter is a ritual object. You attach it because the form wants you to. The hiring manager may or may not see it — often the recruiter screens on the CV alone and the cover letter goes into the PDF graveyard.

An email is a conversation. It lands in an inbox. Someone sees the subject line. They choose whether to open it. If they open it, they choose whether to reply. At every step there's a human making a decision, not a form doing a check.

This is the entire reason pitch emails work better. Not because the content is magically different. Because the delivery mechanism is.

The pitch email

The pitch email is what a cover letter would be if it weren't trying to impress HR. It's sent to a real person — usually the hiring manager, sometimes a peer on the team. It's short. It's specific. It skips the setup.

Here's one that worked for a reader last year. He was applying for a senior data engineer role at a fintech.

Subject: Kafka pipelines — quick note for the senior data eng role

Hi Martin,

Saw the senior data eng opening on your careers page. Applied via the form, but wanted to send a quick note directly.

I've spent the last four years rebuilding Kafka pipelines at two different payments companies. The second one we took from 45-minute latency to sub-second while cutting infrastructure spend by 60%. I noticed from your tech blog that you're hitting similar scaling pain — happy to trade notes on what worked for us regardless of whether this goes anywhere.

CV attached. If there's someone else on the team better to talk to, let me know and I'll reach out to them.

— James

That's 97 words. It took him fifteen minutes to write. He got a reply within a day.

Why it worked

Look at what's in that email and what isn't.

It isn't about him being excited. It isn't about his passion. It isn't about what he'd bring. It isn't a restatement of his CV.

It is about one specific, relevant thing he's done. It references one specific, public thing about the company. It offers a small amount of value upfront (happy to trade notes) without making the whole thing transactional. It closes with an easy out for the reader.

And critically, it was sent from one inbox to another. Not pasted into a form field.

The template

Here's the skeleton. Keep it under 150 words.

1. One-line subject. Specific, not generic. "Kafka pipelines — note for the senior data eng role" not "Application for Senior Data Engineer."
2. One line on why you're writing. "Saw the opening. Applied via the form, sending a note directly."
3. One paragraph on the most relevant thing you've done. Not three. One. Pick the thing that most specifically maps to what they need. Numbers if you have them.
4. One line that references something specific about them. Their blog, a recent announcement, a specific challenge in their industry. Not "I love your mission."
5. One small offer or easy out. "Happy to share what worked." "Let me know if there's someone better to talk to." Gives the reader a gentle on-ramp.
6. Sign-off. CV attached.

That's the whole thing.

Finding the real person

The email fails if you send it to careers@. Find the actual hiring manager. LinkedIn is the fastest path — search the company, filter by "people," look for director/head/VP in the function you're applying to.

If their email isn't on their profile, take the company's email pattern (most teams use firstname@ or firstname.lastname@) and send it. Worst case it bounces and you know. If you're not sure of the pattern, a $5/month tool like Hunter will verify it for you in ten seconds.

What this doesn't replace

You still submit the formal application. The ATS still needs the record. The recruiter still needs the paper trail. The pitch email is parallel to the application, not a replacement.

But it's the thing that gets you read.

Takeaway

A cover letter is a document nobody asked for, addressed to nobody in particular. A pitch email is a note from one person to another. Pick the one that gets answered.