You sent dozens of applications and heard nothing back. The letter is usually the reason. Below are the seven mistakes an AI critic flags most often in real cover letters — each with the bad version, why it kills your application, and the exact fix. At the end, get your own letter checked the same way.
"This is a template-grade letter with zero company-specific detail and no quantified proof of impact, so it will lose to almost any candidate who names projects, metrics, and the employer."
Why it kills your application: Recruiters see this exact opener hundreds of times a day. It says nothing about you, the role, or the company — it signals a mass-applied letter and gets skimmed past in seconds.
Fix: Open with a 2-sentence hook: name the exact role and one concrete reason you are applying (a product feature, a blog post, a mission point), plus one line of proof of your strongest match.
Why it kills your application: Self-praise with no evidence. Every applicant claims passion; the adjective adds nothing the recruiter can verify, and it is the single most common tell of an AI-generated or template letter.
Fix: Cut the adjective and show the work instead: name one project, one tool, and one result. "I rebuilt our dashboard pipeline in SQL and cut reporting time from 3 days to 4 hours" beats "passionate developer" every time.
Why it kills your application: It is an assertion with no proof, and it could appear in any application to any company. Recruiters mentally delete sentences like this.
Fix: Replace it with the closest matching evidence: a bullet that mirrors a requirement in the job ad — the tool, the scale, the outcome.
Why it kills your application: Hiding the employer reads as if you are ashamed of it or have something to hide. Vague duties ("various software projects") compound the vagueness.
Fix: Name the employer and one specific system you worked on. If confidentiality is a real concern, name the industry and product type — "at a logistics startup, the delivery-tracking platform" — and quantify the scope.
Why it kills your application: This sentence could describe any employee at any company. Without specifics, it adds zero information.
Fix: Say what the team shipped and your role in it: "I owned the analytics module in a 6-person squad that launched a mobile app to 40,000 users."
Why it kills your application: A skills list with no scale, no outcome, and no responsibility attached tells the recruiter nothing about impact. In a stack of similar applicants, the one with numbers wins.
Fix: Attach a metric to every skill: users served, latency cut, revenue moved, uptime kept. If you do not have a number, use the size of the system or the team.
Why it kills your application: It is boilerplate with no call to action. The letter ends exactly like hundreds of others, so nothing makes the recruiter want to reply.
Fix: Close with a confident, specific call to action: offer to walk through a relevant project and state your availability — name the thing you will show them, not a generic thanks.
Paste your draft into CoverCraft, and the AI critic scores it 0-100, flags every weak and weakest sentence with the reason, and tells you exactly what to fix — including the clichés below. No account needed, free every day.
Paste your letter and get your own critiqueFree every day — a score, sentence-level fixes, and the exact words to replacePaste your draft letter, and the AI critic reads it paragraph by paragraph: a score from 0 to 100, every weak and weakest sentence flagged with a one-line reason, and a concrete fix for each. Pro adds a full rewritten version of your letter.
Yes — free every day within the daily free quota, with no account or credit card required. Upgrade to Pro for unlimited checks plus a complete rewrite of your letter.
Critique checks a letter you already wrote and tells you what is wrong. Generation writes a new letter from three lines about your experience. Use critique when you have a draft; use generation when you are starting from zero. Pro lets you do both and rewrite.
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