ACIP Video: The Importance of Cover Letters

October 17, 2025

ACIP Video: The Importance of Cover Letters

The latest video from A Course in Production, focusing on the importance of cover letters!

I was recently inspired by the Day 3 topic, Cover Letters Matter, from So You Wanna Be Prod’s Land the Job Prod Summer Camp series , so I wanted to share a couple of quick anecdotes about Cover Letters both from the hiring perspective and the job seeking perspective.

I’ve been in Production for a decade now, and as such, have been part of tons of hiring processes. I remember once when I was hiring Production staff back during the height of the pandemic madness, where everyone was hiring, it was tough to get people in the door, and super super competitive. At the time, we were essentially desperate to get Prod staff in the door. And still, even despite this immense pressure and desperate need to hire more crew FAST we were STILL carefully reviewing applications, including cover letters.

At the time, we had a few recurring habits: first, if a cover letter had obvious mistakes, such as naming the wrong position, submitting the exact same cover letter for two different postings or positions, or not seeming to understand where our studio was, it was pretty much an automatic pass.

Second, the person I was hiring with at the time, my line producer, and I agreed that skill didn’t really matter, you can teach most everything in Production. What we wanted from a cover letter was a sense of fit, personality–would this person fit well with our team, what kind of attitude did they have toward work, could they bring something to the table that our current management team lacked?

Lastly, at the time, hiring was so competitive that we were frequently considering people who had never worked in Animation before; these persons were looking to make a career transition. Cover Letters in this case were key for us to understand how their skills gleaned in sales, health care, public service, etc, were relevant and applicable to a Production Role in Animation.

Often, when we looked at these applicants LinkedIn, their LinkedIn was just a resume, it didn’t tell us about particular skill sets or flesh out how these experiences could be made to work for animation. Cover letters were critical in filling in those gaps for us.

Now for the job seeking side. As animation has been in a downturn again, I have been applying for jobs outside of animation for the first time in my adult life. I’ve been carefully constructing cover letters and building resumes tailored to each position I’m applying to, in order to explain how my project management and crew leadership skills gleaned in animation might apply to roles in other industries.

My diligence has paid off, as I recently had an interview in a completely different industry wherein the interviewer explicitly told me that it was my cover letter that sealed the deal; they otherwise skimmed my resume and didn’t even look at my LinkedIn. They said my cover letter was informative, interesting, funny, and provoked just enough curiosity that they understood the professional experience I brought to the table, and wanted to learn more about my career goals.

Now, to be completely transparent: applying to a job in a new-to-me industry takes me, on average, 2 hours per application. I do not use any AI tools such as ChatGPT for my resumes or cover letters. I spend this two hours tinkering with my resume and cover letter, ensuring my skill set and interest written in these documents matches with what the job description is asking for; I have the skill set, it just depends on the job for how much emphasis I put on a given task or particular area of skill.

Sometimes my skills with production reports matters, sometimes it's more about tracking data via shot and asset tracking. Sometimes I spend more time talking about crew management and leadership, other times I focus on data entry, meeting management, and email etiquette.I also want to emphasize that as I have been applying for jobs all summer, I have built up an arsenal of different resumes, cover letters, etc. I have found that when it’s an entirely new role, an application takes me a minimum 5 hours to build.

As So You Wanna Be Prod reminds us, Cover Letters DO Matter, and in this video I have shown how cover letters impacted me when I was hiring, and, more recently, how I have used cover letters myself during my own job search in order to get hired somewhere new. It’s a lot of work, but I have taken immense comfort in the feedback I received in that one interview – the pains I took to write a custom cover letter and make a relevant resume was worth it; a good cover letter got me an opportunity to interview.