When you’re applying for a position as a personal assistant, you’ll need two things: A great resume, and the perfect cover letter.
Your resume will detail your experience and qualifications, but it’s your cover letter that gives you the chance to really put across your abilities and special skills.
It’s a chance to shine, and show potential employers why you would make an excellent personal assistant.
However, it’s also where you can go terribly wrong!
Make mistakes in your cover letter and your application could be instantly dismissed.
It’s vital that you take time to craft a cover letter that is going to stand out from the crowd, so we’ve put together some top tips to ensure you deliver a winning cover letter with your next personal assistant job application.
Start with tried and tested templates and examples
Firstly, head over to our resource section and grab our free resume templates and cover letter templates.
They are designed specifically for personal assistants and have been used successfully by hundreds of students who have earned their Personal Assistant Certification through us.
If you don’t like our templates (and that’s ok!) go check out the free examples at Teal or JobHero.
Tailor your cover letter to the position you’re applying for
When you’re job hunting, it could be the case that you are applying for several jobs in quick succession.
Perhaps you don’t have a particular career in mind but are versatile and looking at all your options. Maybe you really need a new job and so you’re applying for anything and everything.
When you’re putting in a lot of applications, it can be tempting to send the same cover letter each time, but if the jobs you are applying for are quite different, this is not a wise decision.
Yes, it will save you a little time, but if you invest time in creating a cover letter that is tailored to each job you’re applying for, you’ll have a much better chance of success.
With a unique cover letter, you can highlight your most relevant skills and experience.
You can take it a step further and do some research into the company that is hiring.
From this, you can perhaps glean some information as to the duties you’d be performing as a personal assistant for that particular business.
Perhaps it’s a global business and so it’s likely you’ll be organizing travel. This is the time to highlight your time working as a travel agent. Or maybe it’s a company in the financial sector you’ll be working for, and so your accounting qualifications should be top of the list of things to mention in your cover letter.
Highlight all your skills
The job of a personal assistant is incredibly varied and requires a wide-ranging skillset.
Your cover letter is the perfect place to showcase the skills that will ensure you excel at the job.
Take time to write a list of all your abilities and best qualities, and any experience that demonstrates your capabilities.
You could also ask other people who know you for their suggestions.
It’s amazing what talents you may have that you have overlooked as something to mention in your cover letter.
Organizing the office Christmas party makes you a great event planner, being the person everyone goes to when their computer doesn’t work makes you an excellent troubleshooter.
Everything you do can be a potential skill to put forward in your letter when applying for a job as a personal assistant.
Keep it relevant and to the point
A personal assistant needs to be super-efficient.
The key skills of a personal assistant are to streamline the life of their employer, to organize and consolidate, so each day runs smoothly, with minimal disruption.
You’ll be fielding calls and emails, separating the wheat from the chaff, so your boss isn’t bothered by unnecessary correspondence.
So, with efficiency being utmost in mind, it makes sense not to present a cover letter that is long-winded and full of extraneous information.
You won’t be the only person applying for this position, and the person dealing with hiring the new personal assistant is likely busy themselves.
They won’t have time to read a huge essay. They may only glance over each cover letter, rather than reading them carefully, particularly in the early stages of the selection process.
You don’t want your application to end up in the trash purely because your cover letter was so long they couldn’t be bothered to read it!
So with each point you make in your cover letter, think about it, and decide if it is truly relevant to the job you’re applying for.
Your years working as a teacher? Yes, that’s good to include. It shows you are organized and have good communication and time management skills.
The fact that you love dogs, you have two, their names are Fido and Bob, and you like to walk them in the field behind your house? Perhaps not so relevant unless you’re applying to be the personal assistant for a veterinarian!
With each fact you write, think about whether or not it would be beneficial to the role.
No cheating!
You’ll find many generic example cover letters online, and while they can help as inspiration, it is certainly not a good idea to use these wholesale.
You found it on the internet, so it stands to reason that if your potential employer drops your cover letter into Google, it will quickly alert them to the fact that you’ve simply used someone else’s cover letter.
This immediately makes you look like someone who cuts corners and doesn’t have the ability to write a decent letter.
When the role of personal assistant involves attention to detail, going the extra mile, and communication, it doesn’t put your skills in a very good light.
As mentioned earlier, grab our templates that are designed specifically for personal assistants, and edit them to make them your own.
It can also be tempting to get an AI service to generate your cover letter, and again, this can be useful to help you with layout and content ideas, but when you simply cut and paste the generated content into your application, there’s a good chance the person reading it will determine it’s AI-generated and dismiss your application.
There are plenty of checkers out there, so it’s very easy to find out if a person has written their own cover letter or not.
So it definitely does pay to take time to write a unique cover letter yourself.
If you’re unsure of your cover letter writing skills, you can always get help from a professional to help you fine-tune your letter. It’s certainly the wiser choice than trying to take shortcuts.
Check, check and check again
As a personal assistant, your boss will be handing over many of their personal tasks, such as replying to emails, dealing with accounts and organizing travel.
They need to be able to depend on you to get everything right. They need to be able to rely on you.
So if you send in a cover letter with errors, that’s a huge red flag to any potential employer.
It conveys the feeling that you don’t pay attention to detail, or if there are spelling errors, that you have poor literacy skills.
This could easily cause an application to be rejected, regardless of your prior experience and excellent resume.
So it’s incredibly important that your cover letter is absolutely perfectly written. Pay close attention to spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Read it over several times to ensure it makes sense and ask someone else to read it through too in case there’s something you’ve missed.
