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Hiring partners read cover letter before transcript

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2016 6:02 pm
by BNA
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Re: Hiring partners read cover letter before transcript

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2016 6:06 pm
by RobertGolddust
I've a decent gpa but probably subfloor for most of the majors heading to oci at low T1. Hoping to blow minds via cover letter. Think hiring committees immediately trash all gpas they consider unacceptable?
What is sub floor, or in other words, whats your class rank?

Re: Hiring partners read cover letter before transcript

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2016 6:17 pm
by PeanutsNJam
BNA wrote:Hoping to blow minds via cover letter.
As a kid, did you dream about one day being able to sleep on something softer than a pile of cardboard and having a roof over your head? Did you run into a burning building and save 4 lives, suffering severe burns over 60% of your body? Are you blind? Did you smuggle ketchup packets out of a McDonalds so you don't starve to death, but then have to give them to your 3 younger siblings because they need it more than you do?

Re: Hiring partners read cover letter before transcript

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2016 6:51 pm
by favabeansoup
As one hiring partner once told me: We get probably 1,000 applications for maybe 20 spots. We are busy and our time is a lot of money. There is no physical way we can sit through and read each application and its cover letter. The only possible way is to organize and stack them by GPA (adjusted for school rank and what not), pick a cut off point, and just dump the ones below it.

They might have time to read some of the cover letter's around the cut off point to see if they might like you enough to not throw you away, but that's about it. The only sure fire way to make your cover letter/personality is a thing in the initial interview process is to network individually with attorneys at the firm. That way you send your materials to the specific attorney (or better they ask you for it while you are having coffee, in a phone call, whatever), and they personally forward it to whoever, rather than it just going into the giant stack.