Writing a cover letter with AI without sounding like AI

A good cover letter opens a door your CV only cracks. A bad cover letter closes a door your CV had just opened. AI makes it faster, but easier in both directions. Here's how to lean toward the first.

Typical AI tells

A handful of patterns every modern language model produces, and that recruiters now recognise. Not because AI use is wrong — most recruiters use it themselves — but because an unedited AI text has a tasteless politeness nobody finds anything to say about.

The inflated opener. "With great enthusiasm", "With genuine pleasure", "I am thrilled" — meat with no flavour.
The rule of three. "My passion for X, my experience in Y, and my drive to Z". People don't think in clean triplets. Language models do.
Empty adjectives. "Leading, innovative, dynamic". Has the company called itself that? Do you actually have an opinion on what they're like? Replace or drop.
Negative parallelism. "Not only X, but also Y". Two of these in a letter and you can hear the algorithm.
Em-dash overuse. Subtlest tell, most consistent. Humans use a dash occasionally. LLMs throw them in every three sentences.
The closing euphemism. "I'm looking forward to discussing how I can contribute to your team". That's a forced smile in writing.

What to do instead

1. Start in the middle

Avoid the lead-in. No "I am writing to apply for...". Open with something specific — an observation about the company, a relevant experience, a question about the role. The recruiter knows you're applying; the first line should give you a face.

2. One concrete example in ordinary language

Instead of "I have extensive experience with cross-functional collaboration": "In my last role I sat in the same standup as design, backend, and sales. It sounded like a disaster and became the reason our releases stopped slipping after six months." The second sounds like a person who lived something.

3. Say why this role, not just "a" role

Recruiters read the same standard letter in many flavours. "I'm looking for a challenge where I can grow" isn't false, it's contextless. What is it about this role, this team, this company, this moment in your career that makes this the logical next step? One paragraph on that changes everything.

4. End without the formula

"I look forward to a conversation where we can further explore..." — nobody actually looks forward. Better: "If you're curious where I'd want to take X, give me a call." Or just stop. A letter can end where the story ends.

CVeetje's humanizer pass

Every generated cover letter goes through a second AI pass that reviews the first. The prompt leans on Wikipedia's "signs of AI writing" — a comprehensive list of patterns language models consistently produce. The pass targets:

Inflated symbolism ("beacon of", "world of").
Promotional tone without substance.
Vague attributions ("many people say", "in today's world").
Rule-of-three formula.
Em-dash overuse.
Filler phrases ("It's important to note").
AI vocabulary ("leverage", "robust", "seamless").
Passive voice where active fits.

The pass doesn't rip these out mechanically — that would produce a new mechanical feel. The prompt asks for rewriting toward "what a person would say, not what a chatbot would produce in a template".

What you have to do yourself

Read aloud. Anywhere it doesn't sound like you? Change it.
Add one personal detail. A real preference, an odd observation, an opinion that isn't safe. This is what distinguishes a human from a well-edited AI text.
Cut where you say nothing new. Three pages is too much. One-and-a-half is the max; half a page is enough if you have something concrete to say.

Does it work?

Our internal tests compared letters with and without the humanizer pass. Recruiters we showed both versions to recognised the post-humanizer letters as AI-generated significantly less often than the raw versions. Not a perfect solution — a threshold lowered. A human reading along is still better, and that human is you.