In the fall of 2019, we launched a study of cover letters from product designers.

The goal is to understand how important the cover letter is, what it will indicate in it, how it affects the very top of the hiring funnel: will they miss the response further down the chain or not?

The study was conducted in September-November 2019.

16 invited experts from Yandex, Alfa Bank, Mail, Mail.ru Group, Intercom, Miro, Revolyut, Sberbank, Acronis (and others) analyzed 243 responses to the vacancy of a digital product designer.

The experts

The main criterion for the selection of experts - this person had to make a decision on hiring designers in product teams over the past six months (at the time of the assessment). Experts work in product companies or teams in leading / management positions.

The second important condition was to form an expert team so that women and men were equally represented. This condition is supported by the evaluation algorithm (distribution of response impressions): each response received at least two ratings by women, two ratings by men, then control votes without taking into account the gender of the expert: at least one but not more than three.

Yuri Vetrov (Mail.ru Group), Mikhail Zhashkov (TRA Robotics), Vladimir Zimin (Russian Post), Yulia Urasova (Qiwi Russia), Kostya Gorsky (Intercom), Alina Ermakova (Sberbank), Nikolai Berezovsky (Revolut), Sasha Ermolenko (Mail.ru Group), Denis Kortunov (Acronis), Sergey Kondaurov (Yandex), Ksenia Sternina (Mail.ru Group), Alexander Kovalsky (CreativePeople), Evgenia Malkova (Shelly), Alexey Chupin (MTS), Vlad Zelinsky (Miro , ex-Realtime Board), Anastasia Popova (Alfa-Bank).

Key Findings

We wanted to find out the degree of influence of the cover letter on the success of the response to the vacancy. In short: the impact is huge. More than 60% of the responses will be in the trash, and some will be sent to spam.

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• Anonymous database, all study texts with graphs, interviews with experts, etc. I posted on github .
• Project site