All About Cover Letters
Welcome! This is a mini-survey is for the blog Hiring Librarians. It is intended to be taken by people who have participated in hiring at least one LIS worker (a worker in libraries, archives, and other information fields)

Unlike other Hiring Librarians surveys, responses will be be publicly viewable, so please do not include any information you consider private. They may also be used to create blog posts at hiringlibrarians.com and in related work that is primarily of interest to LIS job hunters and the people that hire them.

All questions relate to cover letters. Please answer from your own experience in hiring. 

There are 21 questions, including multiple choice and demographic questions. It should take 5-10 minutes to complete.

No questions are required. All questions are on one page so you may navigate around and look at all the questions before answering any, skip backwards and forwards, edit before submitting, etc. 

If your organization does *not* consider cover letters, we want to know that too! Questions 1-3 and 17-21 are relevant to this situation.

Questions, comments, and concerns welcome. Contact Emily Weak at hiringlibrarians@gmail.com
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1. What type of organization(s) do you hire for? (Check all that apply)
2. What is your job title?
3.  Does your organization consider Cover Letters as part of job applications?
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4.  Do you ask for cover letters explicitly in the job ad or do you just expect to receive them?
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5.  In one brief sentence, what is the purpose of a cover letter?
6. Do you expect that a cover letter will be tailored to your job opening?
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7.  What information do you want to see included in the cover letter (and is this specified in the job ad)?
8.  Compared to other parts of the application, I give the cover letter:
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9.  What kinds of things make cover letters stand out (in good or bad ways)?
10. Do you have any good stories about a cover letter saving a "bad" application, or vicey versy?
11. What's the best way to address a cover letter (ex: To Whom it May Concern, Dear Hiring Manager, Dear your honorific_your last name, Dear Sir or Madam...)?
12. How many pages should a cover letter be?  
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13. What formats are ok for  cover letter be in? (check all that apply)
14.  If you receive job applications by email, should the cover letter be included: (check all that apply)
15. If your organization has automated application screening, is the automated screening also applied to cover letters?
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16.  Anything else you want to tell us about cover letters?
17. What part of the world are you in?
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18. What's your region like? (Check all that apply)
19. Is your workplace remote/virtual?
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20. How many staff members are at your organization?
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21. Is there anything else you'd like to say, either to job hunters, to hiring managers or to me, the survey author? Or are there any questions you think we should add?
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