For serious job applicants, the cover letter was a way to set themselves apart from the competition. By making the extra effort to explain in a few hundred words why they wanted — and were the right fit for — a job, they hoped their application would go straight to the top of the pile.

The cover letter, however, has become one of the early victims in this rollout of artificial intelligence which the Silicon Valley tech bros tell us will reshape the world. A growing number of companies have stopped asking for cover letters to accompany a candidate’s CV, and those recruiters who do still get them are increasingly ignoring them.

“Cover letters are not worth much any more,” says Timo Lehne, chief executive of SThree, the London-listed recruiter. “I think they are irrelevant.”

Dan Harris, head of London at Robert Walters, another hiring group, agrees. As he explains: “It used to be a method to whittle down the shortlist,” he said. “If you’d bothered to write a cover letter, it would be a differentiator. But in a world where people can use AI to generate a cover letter, it just doesn’t really carry a lot of weight.”

Candidates are now able to put the job advert into ChatGPT or Gemini and get it to spit out a summary of why they are perfect for the job. Sadie Besley, a managing director at Randstad, the global staffing giant, says the result of this new technology is that she and her colleagues have seen a sharp increase in what she calls “perfect on paper applications”, mostly from younger tech-savvy jobseekers.

As a consequence, employers are no longer trusting that a candidate will have written their cover letter themselves and so they are, by and large, ignoring them. “Are [cover letters] a game changer? No, not any more, because have you written it or was it AI? We can’t be sure,” Julia Cames, chief marketing officer at Hays, the FTSE 250 recruitment business, says.

Fabrication leads to frustration

With candidates increasingly using AI to, at best, fine-tune their applications and, at worst, fabricate them entirely, hiring managers are getting frustrated when they bring people in for face-to-face meetings.

“We see thousands of CVs and cover letters a day,” Harris says. “There’s some very consistent patterns around some of these applications looking a little too perfect if I’m honest. Clients are becoming disappointed because they see these CVs land on their desk, where the experience and career history matches up perfectly, but when they get into the room, they aren’t matching up to those expectations.”

• ‘Cheating’ AI tool prompts candidates during job interviews

Jobseekers are using AI not just to write their applications, but also submit them at a rapid pace. Some are using software that will apply for jobs even when they are sleeping. This new-found easiness of applying, coupled with a more competitive jobs market, means companies that are still hiring are getting inundated with applications. PwC, the Big Four accounting firm, said earlier this month that it had 60,000 graduates and school leavers apply for 2,000 entry-level roles last year.

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