Letter of Interest: Sample, Template, and When It Works

Be honest about the odds

Most pages on this topic open with the claim that 70 or 80 percent of jobs are never advertised. The figure has no clean source. It was popularised by Richard Bolles around 1980 and is usually credited to him, but researchers have traced versions of it back further, to the career counsellor Bernard Haldane in the 1960s, citing a Ford Foundation-funded survey of employers in Rochester, New York. The survey was real and local, and its own report noted that the city's larger employers had agreed not to advertise in the Rochester papers, which is exactly what would produce a hidden job market there and nowhere else.

The problem is not that nobody measures recruitment channels. Governments do, on a cycle: the UK Employer Skills Survey found in its 2022 Scotland report that 74 percent of employers with vacancies recruited by word of mouth or personal recommendation, against 54 percent using their own website. The problem is that a local 1960s number about newspapers keeps getting quoted as a current national fact about the internet.

What does hold up is narrower and more useful. Referrals are a small share of applications and a large share of hires. The academic root is Mark Granovetter's 1974 study Getting a Job, which found more than half of professional, technical and managerial workers reached their post through personal contacts rather than formal channels. The recruiting numbers everyone quotes are thinner than they look: Jobvite index data reported in 2012 put referrals at 6.9 percent of applicants, with the hiring share given as a range of about 28 to 40 percent drawn from two different vendors' datasets, and SilkRoad's analysis of 2016 applicant-tracking data from more than a thousand companies put referrals above 30 percent of all hires. Vendor data, a decade or more old, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement. The gap between the two figures is the part that matters. A letter of interest works when it behaves like a referral rather than an application, which means a named person, a specific reason for approaching them, and ideally someone who can vouch for you. Sent cold to a general inbox, it is a lottery ticket. Sent to the head of a team you can name a problem for, it is a conversation.

When it is worth writing

• You have a connection, however thin: a former colleague there, a conference conversation, a shared client.
• The company is visibly growing, opening a location, launching a product, or has just raised money, which is when roles exist before they are posted.
• You can name a specific problem you would work on, not just an interest in the sector.
• Your field hires by reputation, such as research, specialist trades, or senior roles that are usually filled through networks.
• You are relocating to a city where the employer is one of a handful worth approaching.

Where none of that is true, your time is better spent on advertised roles with a strong cover letter.

All of this assumes you know which problem you want to be paid to solve. If that is the open question, work it out from your own history first: the career task audit takes about two hours and saves you writing to the wrong employers.

Do the research before you write

The letter is only as good as what you know. Find the person who would manage the role rather than the HR inbox, and check the company's recent news, job postings for adjacent roles, and what their team writes publicly. Two or three concrete details are enough, and they have to be specific enough that the letter could not have been sent to a competitor.

What to include

• Who you are and why them, in the first two sentences, with the connection or trigger named.
• What you would do for them. Frame it as a problem you can help with, not a job you want.
• Brief evidence. One or two results that fit the problem, with numbers.
• A low-friction ask. A twenty-minute conversation, not "please consider me for any suitable vacancy".
• What you will do next, so the follow-up is not a surprise.

Keep it shorter than a cover letter: 200 to 300 words. Nobody asked for this letter, so its length is a courtesy question.

A complete example

Sent after a conference conversation, to a named manager. Every person, company, event and figure below is invented: replace all of them with your own, and do not borrow the numbers.

Both this letter and a blank version to write into sit in the .docx.

The template

Sending and following up

Email is standard, and the letter goes in the body rather than as an attachment nobody opens; attach the CV separately. Put the reason in the subject line: "Maintenance scheduling, following your conference panel" beats "Enquiry". If someone referred you, say so in the subject or the first line, because that is the single strongest thing in the message. The formal email guide covers subject lines and the routing rules in general.

Writing into the EU or EEA, add a line saying you consent to your CV being kept on file for future openings. Without it the recipient often has no lawful basis to hold on to an unsolicited application, and the polite outcome is that it gets deleted.

Follow up once, around ten days later, on the same thread, and keep it to two sentences. If that goes unanswered, leave it: a second chase is unlikely to produce a reply and can read as pressure. Coming back in six months with something new to say, a qualification, a project, a piece of their news, is fair and often works better than the first attempt.

The LinkedIn version

Much of this now happens as a message rather than a letter, and the constraints are tighter than the letter's. On a free account a connection request note is capped at 200 characters, spaces and line breaks included, against 300 on Premium. That is room for one sentence on why them and one on what you did, with everything else saved for the reply. There is a second limit that catches people out: a free account can attach a note to only a handful of requests each month, and LinkedIn's own help pages currently give the number as three in one place and five in another. Once they are gone the request goes out bare, which is exactly the cold approach this page tells you not to make.

Check what your account can do before you plan around it. On a free account you can only message people you are already connected to, and InMail to a stranger needs Premium. For most readers that makes the emailed letter above the main channel rather than the fallback. Spend the few notes you get on the people whose work you have read, and email the rest.

Two more differences worth knowing. A message is read on a phone, so the first line has to work with no subject line to set it up. And the profile does the work your CV would do in an email, which means it needs to say what the message claims before you send: if your headline still describes the job you left two years ago, fix that first.

Common mistakes

• Writing to the company rather than a person. "To Whom It May Concern" tells the reader this went to fifty employers.
• Asking for "any suitable position". It puts the work of finding you a role onto the reader.
• Leading with what you want. Your career goals are not a reason for a stranger to reply. Their problem is.
• Attaching the letter as a PDF in the US, UK and Commonwealth markets, where a cold message has to be readable in the preview pane. Parts of continental Europe still expect a formal attached application document, so check the local convention before you follow this one.
• Reusing a cover letter. A letter written for a posting reads as recycled the moment there is no posting to point at.

Sources

• The "80 percent of jobs are never advertised" claim: popularised by Richard Bolles around 1980, traced by later archival research to Bernard Haldane in the 1960s citing a Ford Foundation-funded survey of employers in Rochester, New York, whose report recorded that the city's larger employers had agreed not to advertise in the local papers. No clean primary source exists for the figure as it is quoted today.
• Recruitment channels, official measurement: UK Employer Skills Survey 2022, Scotland report, 74 percent of employers with vacancies recruited by word of mouth or personal recommendation against 54 percent using their own website.
• Referrals: Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (1974), more than half of professional, technical and managerial workers found their post through personal contacts. Jobvite index data reported by ERE in 2012: referrals 6.9 percent of applicants, with the hiring share given as a 28 to 40 percent range across two vendors' datasets. SilkRoad analysis of 2016 applicant-tracking data from more than 1,000 companies: referrals over 30 percent of all hires and 45 percent of internal hires. All vendor applicant-tracking data, not national statistics.
• LinkedIn help pages: connection request note capped at 200 characters on a free account and 300 on Premium; personalised invitations limited on free accounts, given as three in one place and five in another; direct messaging limited to existing connections without Premium, and InMail is a Premium feature.
• EU and EEA data protection: an unsolicited CV normally needs the applicant's consent before an employer may retain it for future recruitment.