cover-letter

cover-letter is a skill for Claude Code from extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager. It costs 80 tokens per session (730 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for drafting a job-specific cover letter from a person's resume, profile, and the employer's job description.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to identify relevant experience, write a concise tailored letter in the applicant's voice, check claims against source documents, and save a copy for review.
Why use it?
It helps produce a truthful letter that connects real experience to the role instead of using a generic template or unsupported claims.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the dear-hiring-manager plugin — 7 skills, 6 commands, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to identify relevant experience, write a concise tailored letter in the applicant's voice, check claims against source documents, and save a copy for review.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager/cover-letter
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager --skill cover-letter
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install dear-hiring-manager, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 6 commands, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for cover-letter

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager/cover-letter/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager/cover-letter)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager/cover-letter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager/cover-letter/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for cover-letter

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager/cover-letter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager/cover-letter.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 730 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00080 $0.00730
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.00365
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00146
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00073

Measured 11d ago against content hash 6de0bd5f7792, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cover-letter scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/cover-letter/SKILL.md · 45 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 45 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cover letter

Draft a tailored cover letter for one role. Truthful, specific, concise — never a generic template.

Inputs

  • ~/.dear-hiring-manager/resume.* and profile.md — the candidate.
  • The job description + company. If given only a URL, open it and extract the JD first (see apply).

Procedure

  1. Read the resume, profile, and JD. Find a hook: the JD's core problem, a recent company launch/news, or a concrete result you can speak to.
  2. Draft the letter (~300–400 words, 3–4 short paragraphs; under 250 reads thin, over 500 won't get finished):
    • Open with a specific hook — NOT "I'm excited/passionate to apply." Tie the first line to company research / the JD's core problem / a concrete result. Specificity earns the second sentence read.
    • Body: each paragraph maps one JD requirement to a real, resume-backed story with numbers (2–3 measurable accomplishments, not a skills list). Mirror the JD's own language — "you need X, I did Y" signals a careful read. No claim that isn't in the resume.
    • Close with a direct call to action — ask for a conversation.
  3. Voice + tone: match the candidate's register from the resume — professional but distinct, not a corporate template. Role-fit: engineering → substance over polish; sales → lead with results/numbers; creative → a distinct perspective.
  4. Humanize. Run the draft through the humanize skill — no em/en-dashes, no parenthetical asides, no AI tells, vary sentence length, sound like the candidate. Plus: no generic skill claims without evidence, no over-explaining gaps or pivots, no ATS-breaking formatting (keep it plain text).
  5. Flag it review-me and save to ~/.dear-hiring-manager/runs/<company-role-slug>/cover-letter.md, then deliver it to the form (see below).

Deliver it to the form

  • Textarea / "enter manually" → fill the field with the letter text.
  • File upload ("Attach") → write the letter to a real file first (~/.dear-hiring-manager/runs/<slug>/cover-letter.txt, or .pdf), stage it into .playwright-mcp/ (Playwright's sandbox root), upload from there, then delete the staged copy. Accepted types are usually pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf.

Read the full file on GitHub · 45 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 45 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A 6de0bd5f7792

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cover-letter is a skill published in the GitHub repository extrasmall0/dear-hiring-manager (108 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 730 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

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