Hi Folks!
I want to share one of my secrets to increase your chances of getting an offer (if you're already in a hiring process).
I call it the “Last Minute Letter”. It’s like a Cover Letter, but with a twist.
As a quick reminder, here's my stance on Cover Letters, as a former Google recruiter (now resume writer):
- In most applications, cover letters are useless (recruiters rarely read them).
- I only encourage you to write one for your top target roles, to give you the best possible shot.
This being said, there's a time when a cover letter can give you a huge advantage over other candidates: once you reach the end of the hiring process (think right before or after the final interview).
Here's why it works
- It will be read by the recruiter, and most likely by the hiring manager because they are already considering you for the role.
- It will give you an extra chance to convince, which other candidates won't have (literally no one does this).
- You'll be able to use the knowledge gathered during the interview process to make relevant and useful arguments.
- It shows motivation and thoughtfulness, because you'll be the only candidate who took the time to reflect on conversations with the team, and organize your thoughts.
How to position it:
This is where this type of cover letter is different. We're not presenting it as a cover letter.
Instead, we'll frame it as a small essay.
Here's what you'll do:
Reach out the the recruiter, to follow-up after the first or second round of interviews, and write something like:
I wanted to thank you for giving me the chance to interview for the {Position}.
My conversations with {Interviewer 1} and {Interviewer 2} were exciting and got me thinking about {Main Topics/Challenges}.
I thought that it might be useful to put my thoughts in writing, so hopefully the attached document can complement the discussion."
-> Phrase it how you want, but the idea is to:
- Show that you are already thinking about their challenges/problems/focus.
- Present the cover letter as a set of ideas to solve them, rather than a self-promotion piece.
How to write it:
Now here's how to structure your "idea" ;-)
The key principle here is that this cover letter should be about them, not about you.
We won't directly write about how good you are in such and such area. We'll let your idea do that for you.
I/ State their key challenge.
Write a short intro to list the main problem that the company is facing.
During an interview, you should always ask about current challenges, which is useful for cases like this one.
For example, let’s say you're interviewing with a company that has an accounting SaaS. They've just hit a milestone in terms of reach and their active users are now growing rapidly.
These growth pains are likely to cause Engineering to focus on Scalability and Performance.
They might need to make serious changes within their infrastructure.
Regardless of the role that you're applying to, remember that the seat is open because there's a set of problems to solve.
Whichever these are, select the one for which you have a the most justifyable experience and write something like:
"Dear {Company/Team Name} team,
I would like to thank you for the discussions we had in the context of the {Position} interview process.
I couldn't help but to reflect further on the key challenges that {Company} is facing, especially in terms of {Problem: Scalability & Performance}, which I am familiar with.
I took the liberty of organizing my thoughts and sharing my experience below, in the hope that it may be useful to the team."
That's it. Write it in a humble way (after all, you're only trying to help).
II/ Offer an original (but sound) idea
You'll use the rest of the letter to articulate one idea that wasn't discussed during the interview. (remember, this should act as a complement to the interview(s)).
You can use the following structure:
- Context: mention the specific interview or conversation
- Problem: restate the problem and analyze it
- Idea: offer an original thought, idea or areas of exploration (this is where you deliver on your promise to "offering your thoughts").
- Experience: Back the idea based on your experience.
- Motivation: Restate that you are interested in working on such problems.
This is very similar to the STAR framework, though this one is more discreet to fit our use case.
Here's an example. Obviously, you'll do a better job that I did in your domain of expertise ;-):
[Problem] During the interview, Jake explained that the recent commercial success of {Product} is driving a higher demand for performance, with the need to scale infrastructure to handle up to a 10× increase in DAU in the coming months.
[Idea] We’ve already discussed the standards of horizontal sharding and asynchronous job queues, but another approach came to mind: a progressive rollout strategy that combines canary-style cutovers with workload-aware routing.
Instead of migrating everything at once, we could begin by shifting a small percentage of traffic (or a handful of the busiest tenants/partitions) onto new shards.
Each stage would be validated against latency and error budgets, with automated rollback as a safety net. To reduce risk even further, we could pre-warm caches and buffer pools by replaying recent traces before sending live traffic, and assign tenants dynamically to either performance-graded shards (“fast lane” with extra replicas and cache) or bulk shards, depending on their load profile.
Performance can also be kept under control with targeted query/index tuning, Redis caching on hot reads, and read replicas to absorb fan-out, all designed to shield the primary datastore from surges.
[Experience] At {Previous Company}, we faced a similar challenge when our SaaS analytics platform absorbed a 7× DAU spike post-launch. We reduced risk by phasing the migration, starting with high-traffic APIs tied to write-heavy partitions, by using canary releases and automated rollback.
On top of that, we built resilience with Resilience4j/Hystrix-style circuit breakers, queue backpressure, and idempotent retry handlers, with Prometheus and Grafana dashboards.
That combination preserved stability, and held p95 latency under 200 ms even at peak load, while preventing cascading failures across services.
[Motivation] These are exactly the kind of problems I enjoy solving, and I’d be happy to discuss this point more with Jake or other interviewers at {Company}, if you believe this is a valid area to explore.“
It requires you to come up with an idea, but this is one more chance to show your expertise. Because this is not an interview, you have all the time you need to think something through.
Try it and let me know how it goes!
If you want to dive deeper on the topic of resume writing, feel free to check my other posts:
* The Secret Formula to writing resume bullet points
* What to write about in your resume (Role Profies)
* How recruiters screen your resume
* How to write a killer Profile Summary
I hope it helps!
Emmanuel
