Open the extension, click the Settings icon, and go to the Personalize tab.
Under Voice & Feel, set:
AnalyticalProfessional and Confident (you can choose up to two)Analytical voice is the right default for most engineering roles. It signals precision and suits a discipline where showing your reasoning matters. Add Confident to avoid the hedged, over-qualified phrasing that appears in a lot of AI-generated text.
For startup roles, swap Analytical for Bold. For developer advocacy, solutions engineering, or anything with a customer-facing component, Warm works better than either.
Still in Voice & Feel, set Hook Style to Achievement-led.
This controls how the first sentence of your letter is framed. Achievement-led opens with something you built, shipped, or improved — not with a statement about yourself. The difference:
Before (story-driven):
“My journey into software started when I was fourteen and built my first website…”
After (achievement-led):
“In my last role I reduced our CI pipeline from 22 minutes to 6 by parallelising test suites — the kind of infrastructure work I’d want to continue on your platform team.”
The second version tells the reader what you do and why you’re relevant to them. It does that in one sentence.
Under Content Emphasis, set:
Skills and Achievements (deselect Experience unless you’re applying to a role where company or team pedigree is specifically valued)Quantified if your resume has numbers you’re proud of; Mixed if some do and some don’tA quantified achievement style pushes the generated letter toward specifics: percentages, scale, time saved, error rates reduced. If your work doesn’t produce clean metrics — infrastructure, platform engineering, open-source — use Mixed, which blends numbers with narrative where available.
Avoid Narrative unless you’re applying to a role where the storytelling itself is being evaluated (developer relations, technical writing, engineering leadership). For most IC roles, specific numbers beat a well-told story.
In the Skills to Highlight field, paste the technical stack from the JD, then add two or three skills that differentiate you from a median candidate for the role.
Example for a backend role:
Go, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, distributed systems, performance tuning
ApplyGen surfaces these in the letter body — they don’t just sit in a list, they get woven into the arguments the letter makes. Keep this list honest. If a skill appears here and nowhere in your resume, a hiring manager who interviews you will notice.
Under Structure, set:
2503 short paragraphsThree short paragraphs is the right structure for most engineering cover letters. The three jobs those paragraphs need to do:
Under 350 words. Anything longer signals you’re not prioritising the reader’s time, which is exactly the wrong signal to send to an engineering team.
In the Avoid Mentioning field, enter:
passionate, team player, fast learner, synergy, love coding
These phrases appear in every letter and carry zero weight. A hiring manager at a company like Stripe or Linear reads hundreds of applications. “Passionate developer” tells them nothing they couldn’t infer from the fact that you applied. Cut it, replace nothing — the letter is better without it.
Add any other phrases that feel like filler to you personally. This list persists across all your generations until you change it.
The default salutation is “Dear Hiring Manager.” It works, but a specific name works better. It signals you spent two minutes looking.
Before generating, search LinkedIn for the engineering recruiter or hiring manager listed on the role. Most job postings on LinkedIn surface the poster. Many Greenhouse and Lever postings link to a recruiter.
When you have a name, update the Salutation field to Dear [First Name], or Dear [First Name] [Last Name], — whichever reads naturally for the company’s culture.
If you genuinely can’t find a name after a reasonable search, leave the default. Don’t invent one.
If you’re applying to multiple engineering roles, save these settings as a named style preset so you don’t reconfigure them each time. In the Personalize tab, click Save as Preset, name it something like “Engineering — Standard”, and set it as active. You can create up to 5 presets and switch between them from the popup.
For a full walkthrough of the style presets system, see the ApplyGen Update v1.9.0: Style Presets and Advanced Personalization post.
The generated letter sounds too generic. Check that your resume is uploaded and that the Skills to Highlight field matches the specific JD — not a generic list of everything you know. The more specific the inputs, the more specific the output.
The opening line doesn’t reflect your strongest achievement. Switch Hook Style to Achievement-led if it isn’t already, then make sure your resume text includes the specific achievement you want foregrounded. ApplyGen pulls from your uploaded resume, so what’s in there shapes what comes out.
The letter is coming out too long. Verify your Word Limit is set to 250 and Length Structure is set to 3 short paragraphs. Both need to be set — word limit alone won’t enforce the structure.
ApplyGen says it can’t find a job description on the page. Some job boards render the posting dynamically. Try waiting for the full page to load, then clicking the extension icon again. If the posting is behind a login, make sure you’re signed in to the job site before opening the extension.
Should I always include a cover letter when applying to engineering roles? No. Most ATS-first applications have a cover letter field that goes unread. Write one when the posting says it’s required, when you’re applying to a company small enough that a human reads first, when you have a referral to name, or when something about your background needs context — a career switch, a gap, a non-traditional path. Skip it when you’re applying through a large ATS with no prompt and no relationship.
My resume already lists my tech stack. Why repeat it in the cover letter? You’re not repeating it — you’re using it to make an argument. The resume says you know TypeScript. The cover letter says you used TypeScript to cut API response time by 40% at a company with the same scale as the one you’re applying to. Different jobs.
What if I don’t have metrics to put in an achievement-led opening?
Most engineers undercount their metrics — check your commit history, pull request descriptions, and any post-mortems. If there genuinely aren’t numbers, use a specific deliverable instead: “Led the migration of a monolithic Django app to microservices” is concrete enough. Set Achievement Style to Narrative in ApplyGen if you’re consistently working without quantifiable outcomes.
How many style presets should I set up? Two is enough for most engineers: one for startups (Bold voice, Achievement-led hook, Confident tone) and one for larger or more traditional companies (Neutral voice, Professional and Formal tones, Standard closing). You can create up to 5 presets as a Google-signed-in user.
Is ApplyGen’s generated letter ready to send as-is? Treat it as a strong first draft. The one thing a generator can’t do is add the sentence that only you could write — a specific observation about the company’s product, a shared problem you’ve lived, a genuine reason you want this role over a competing offer. Add that before you send.
Get the settings right once, save them as a preset, and every letter ApplyGen generates starts from a position that’s already better than the median application. The rest is the one sentence that makes yours specific. ```
]]>Most people applying to jobs aren’t sending the same letter to the same type of role every time. A product manager applying to an early-stage startup needs a different tone than when applying to a large bank — and the old single-configuration setup forced you to manually change settings each time or accept a one-size-fits-all result.
With presets, you set up each configuration once. Name one “Startup” and one “Enterprise,” or split by emphasis — skills-forward for technical roles, achievements-forward for leadership ones. Switching takes one click before you generate.
The expanded parameter set also gives the AI more signal to work with. Specifying a skills list, for example, means the model pulls from your actual priorities rather than inferring them from resume text alone. If you’re a career switcher trying to get a specific set of transferable skills into every letter, this is where you set that. (Our post on writing cover letters with no experience covers that situation in more detail.)
Update your extension to get these improvements.
]]>Every applicant without experience says some version of this. “I’m a quick learner.” “I’m passionate about this field.” “I’m eager to contribute.” These phrases appear in the majority of entry-level cover letters, which means they function as noise rather than signal.
The HBR piece on cover letters from 2014 makes a point that still holds: the cover letter’s job is to show the employer what you’ll do for them, not to narrate your feelings about the opportunity. An applicant who writes “I am passionate about UX design” has told a hiring manager nothing actionable. An applicant who writes “I redesigned the navigation flow for my university’s student portal as a semester project, which reduced average task completion time in user tests by 30%” has shown something real.
One of those people gets a callback. The other gets filed.
This is where a lot of first-job applicants undersell themselves. “No work experience” usually means no paid work experience. That’s a narrower category than it sounds.
Internships count as experience. Frame them identically to a paid role — what you were responsible for, what you produced, what the result was. The letter doesn’t need to specify whether you were paid.
Volunteer roles count. If you managed social media for a non-profit, coordinated volunteers for an event, or tutored students, those are real responsibilities with real outputs. A recruiter reviewing a cover letter for a project coordinator role doesn’t need the role to have been salaried to take it seriously.
Academic projects count, and are underused. If you built a working web application for a class, ran a semester-long marketing simulation, wrote a policy analysis that your professor shared with a government body, or conducted original research — those are legitimate portfolio items. The fact that a professor assigned the project doesn’t dilute what you built.
Side projects and self-directed work count. Taught yourself Python and built a script that automates something? Ran an Instagram account that reached 10,000 followers? Started and managed a campus club? All of it is evidence of capability.
The test isn’t whether someone paid you. The test is whether you did real work that produced a real result.
For a first-job cover letter, a three-paragraph structure is the right default. It forces you to be selective, and it’s easy to read in 30 seconds — which is about how long it gets.
Paragraph one: the specific hook. This is where most first-time applicants go wrong. They open with “I am writing to apply for the Marketing Assistant position” or “I have always been interested in communications.” Both openings waste the most-read sentence in the letter. Instead, open with your strongest piece of evidence.
Before:
“I am a recent graduate with a degree in Communications and a strong interest in digital marketing. I am excited to bring my skills to your team.”
After:
“Last semester, I ran the social media strategy for a campus non-profit’s annual fundraiser — three platforms, zero budget, and a 40% increase in donations compared to the previous year. That’s the kind of problem I want to work on at [Company].”
The second version tells the hiring manager something specific in the first sentence. It also contains a number, which makes it citable and credible.
Paragraph two: connect your experience to their need. Take one or two things from paragraph one and link them explicitly to what the job description says. If the JD mentions “data analysis” and you ran statistical analysis for a class research project, say so directly: “Your JD mentions comfort with data analysis — in my research methods course, I ran regression analysis in R on a dataset of 2,000 responses and presented the findings to a panel of faculty.”
Don’t list everything you’ve done. Pick the two things most relevant to this specific role and go deep on those instead of shallow on six.
Paragraph three: a short, direct close. Two or three sentences. Don’t say “I would be honoured to be considered.” Say something like: “I’d welcome a conversation about how my project work maps to what you’re building. I’m available for an interview at any time that suits you.” That’s it. Sign off and stop.
Every cover letter — regardless of experience level — needs at least one sentence that is specific to this company and this role. Not “I admire your company’s commitment to innovation.” Something real: a product you use, a piece of research the team published, a decision the company made that you have a view on.
This matters more for inexperienced applicants, not less. When you don’t have a long employment history to distinguish you, your specificity is one of the few signals available to the reviewer. It shows you read the job description, thought about the company, and wrote a letter for them — not a letter for anyone.
A useful test: could this paragraph appear, unchanged, in a letter to a competitor? If yes, rewrite it.
A common objection: “My project was just a class assignment. It wasn’t real.” This undersells it.
Class assignments with real outputs are real. A web app that works is a web app that works. A financial model that produces defensible outputs is a financial model. An analysis that a professor cited is an analysis that held up to scrutiny.
The framing matters. “I completed a project in my data structures course” is weak. “I built a route-optimisation tool in Python as part of my data structures coursework — it’s on my GitHub and handles inputs up to 10,000 nodes” is strong. Same project, different presentation.
If the project feels small, look for the real result. What did it produce? Who saw it? What decision or outcome did it affect? Even a small result, stated specifically, is worth more than a large claim stated vaguely.
You don’t need to pretend the gap doesn’t exist. One brief acknowledgement is fine — “While this would be my first professional role in engineering” — and then you pivot immediately to what you do bring. Don’t dwell. Don’t apologise. A sentence is enough.
What you should never do is write a letter that is primarily about your lack of experience. If a reviewer finishes your letter thinking mainly about what you haven’t done, you’ve spent your most valuable marketing real estate working against yourself.
The goal is to make the hiring manager think about your project, your output, your skill — and then, almost as an afterthought, realise you’re early in your career. Not the other way around.
If there’s a hiring manager’s name in the job posting, or findable on LinkedIn with two minutes of searching, use it. “Dear Jordan” is better than “Dear Hiring Manager.” It signals you looked, and it makes the letter feel like a letter rather than a mail merge.
On large applications through Workday or Greenhouse — where the letter may go into a database and be reviewed by multiple people at different stages — “Dear Hiring Manager” is acceptable. But on a small company’s application, or anywhere a specific name is surfaced in the posting, use it.
If you’re writing multiple versions of this letter for different companies, the mechanical parts — formatting, structure, pulling keywords from the job description — are where most of the time goes. ApplyGen handles that layer: it reads the job posting and builds a tailored draft so you can spend your time on the one paragraph that actually needs to be yours.
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