5 nontraditional cover letters that worked

Everyone knows you need to submit a great cover letter with your job application.* But you might not know that that great cover letter doesn’t have to be written in “business block” form. You don’t even have to use Microsoft’s “Clippy.”

A nontraditional cover letter can take the form of a list of quotes, a table or chart, or an infographic. It doesn’t even have to be a letter at all, if it succeeds in getting a hiring manager’s attention.

Here are five examples of nontraditional cover letters (and some non-letters) that landed people interviews:

1. The chart

Try listing the job ad’s requirements on the left and matching them to your qualifications on the right, like in this example, which landed a recent grad a position at a major metropolitan newspaper.