About me

Dear Sir/Madam/Otherwise,

I'd like to start by introducing myself. My name's Rob, I'm 26 and I currently live at home. My principal motivation to earn a decent living is of course to stop introducing myself as a 26 year old who lives at home. However, I'm not someone who can do just any job and plod along. It's a basic need of mine to be pushed and challenged in a role that I genuinely care about, and that's why I'm getting in touch with you today.

What really peaked my interest in your advert, and in all honesty gave me a little smile, was that you mentioned "love of the written word" as a required attribute. You'll see from my CV that I have a degree in English Literature, but I won't be so dull as to put that forward as evidence. I'd rather share a story from my time studying for that degree.

In the first term of my first year we had to do a module named "Introduction to English". Admittedly, I didn't get a very good overall mark from it. In my idealistic youthful stubbornness I decided it had a condescending name and I put little to no effort into it, but I digress. In the first lecture of this module, our lecturer asked why we picked English as a degree subject. There were the usual answers, "I love reading Byron", "I just really love poetry", and so on. When it came to my turn, I didn't really have anything to say about anything specific, so I just stood up and decided to see what would come out. What that turned out to be was, "I'm Rob, and I just really like words man", in my East London accent.

The majority of the room laughed, but I didn't mean it to be a jovial thing. That is genuinely why I picked the subject. Words fascinate me in a way that not many other things do. So when I saw that line in your advert, it reminded me of that, and I took that as a sign that I should apply.

Something else that stood out to me in the same section was the call for a candidate with a "calm manner and an ability to handle difficult situations".

Well, my PlayStation Network name is "GenghisCalm", and my girlfriend's dad recently described me as "so chilled", but I'll give you something less anecdotal to go with that.

I currently work for Ladbrokes, as a Customer Service Manager. That basically means that I'm in charge of a small team of cashiers and am responsible for the daily running of a betting shop. In other words, I take the blame for anything that goes wrong whether it's my fault or not. And to be fair, I don't want to seem like I'm complaining because I'm fine with that and I enjoy the responsibility. It does however require a calm attitude and a clear head constantly, because the shop business is literally taking money and giving money back to customers. Understandably, people aren't happy when their money is unsure circumstances, so a big part of the job is having that calm approach. Personally, I believe that also breeds a confidence that any situation that may arise can be dealt with just as easily as it was created.

As we're on the subject of work, I suppose this is where I bring up the awkward part. You mentioned you wanted to know my salary requirements...

I currently earn roughly £16,000 a year with Ladbrokes. I would want to stay around that kind of salary for the time being, but obviously the opportunity to work into a role with more challenges and therefore more money is paramount to me applying. I mention in my CV that I'm ambitious person, and that's entirely true. I hope to one day progress into Content Management, but I also understand and appreciate the work and effort required to get to that stage.

I think what I'm going for in this cover letter is that I think we'd get on, and it'd be really nice to hear from you soon.

If you've got any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Yours sincerely,

Rob