Cover letters in Canada: when to send one and what to say

Do cover letters still matter in Canada?

Sometimes, and you can usually tell which time it is. Plenty of applications are decided on the resume, and for those a cover letter is skimmed or skipped. It earns its place when the employer has asked for one, when the person reading applications is also the person hiring, and when your resume on its own would leave the reader confused about why you applied.

When we looked into applicant tracking systems in 2023, the thing that stuck with us was how ordinary the software is. It stores your resume and your cover letter in one place so a person can find them. No machine scores the letter, and nobody treats it as a formality. Either a person reads it or nobody does, and your job is to write something that holds up in the first case.

Use this to decide.

The fifth row gets overlooked. When you email a company directly, the message in the body of that email is your cover letter, whether you call it one or not. Karan, who went from Burger King to a Business Development Representative offer, got his first real replies once he started emailing companies directly, and the people who interviewed him told him his emails had a personal touch. That is the same skill as a good cover letter, used in a different envelope.

What does a Canadian cover letter look like?

One page, and usually well under it. Three or four short paragraphs, roughly 250 to 350 words, in the same plain font as your resume. Job Bank's description is a useful standard to hold yourself to: concise, well written, and tailored to the company and the job you are applying for [1].

The shape we use:

1. Header. Your name, email, phone number, and your city and province. The same contact block as your resume, so the two documents look like a set. No full street address, for the same reasons given in our Canadian resume format guide.
2. Greeting. The hiring manager's name if the posting or a quick search gives it to you. "Dear Hiring Manager" if not. Avoid "To whom it may concern", which reads like a form letter because it usually is one.
3. Opening paragraph. The exact job title, and one sentence on why you are a strong fit. Not your life story, and not how excited you are to apply.
4. Evidence paragraph. Two or three of the posting's main requirements, each matched to something you have actually done, with a number wherever a number exists.
5. Why this employer. One or two sentences that could only be written about this company. Something from their own site, a product, a service, a stated priority, connected to your experience.
6. Close. A plain request for a conversation, and a thank-you. One line each.

Save it as a PDF unless the portal asks for something else, and name the file with your name and the role, the same way you name your resume.

A cover letter structure you can adapt

Use this as a skeleton, not a script. Every bracket needs something specific to you and to this posting. If a bracket is hard to fill, that is useful information: it usually means the role is a weaker match than you thought, or that you have not read the posting closely enough yet.

[Your name]
[Email] | [Phone] | [City, Province]

[Date]

Dear [Hiring manager's name, or "Hiring Manager"],

I'm applying for the [exact job title] role at [Company]. I have
[X years] of experience in [function], most recently [one line on the
most relevant thing you did], and I think that experience fits what
your team has described in the posting.

Three things in the posting stood out to me:

- [Requirement 1 from the posting]: [what you did, with a number]
- [Requirement 2 from the posting]: [what you did, with a number]
- [Requirement 3 from the posting]: [what you did, with a number]

[One or two sentences on why this company specifically: something
you read on their site or in the posting, connected to your work.]

I'd welcome the chance to talk about how I could contribute to
[team or goal]. Thank you for your time.

[Your name]

The bulleted middle is deliberate. A hiring manager scanning a pile of letters can see in five seconds that you read the posting and that you have the three things it asked for. Paragraphs of the same content take longer to find, and some readers stop looking.

How do you match a cover letter to the posting?

Pick the three requirements the employer cares about most, and give each one a sentence of evidence. That is the whole method. The hard part is choosing the right three, and it takes about five minutes if you do it in order.

1. Read the posting twice. The first time for the role. The second time with a pen, marking every requirement.
2. Find the three that matter most. They are usually the ones in the job title, the ones that appear first, and the ones repeated in different words. "Stakeholder management" in the summary and "working with business partners" in the duties are the same requirement said twice, which tells you it matters.
3. Write one sentence of evidence for each. What you did, how big it was, what changed because of it.
4. Check the words. If the posting says "vendor management" and your sentence says "supplier coordination", use their phrase where it is accurate. A person skimming your letter is looking for their words, and if your letter never uses them, they have to translate for you. Most will not.

Here is what the difference looks like in practice.

The right-hand column is harder to write, and that is the point. Anybody can claim the left column. Only you can write your version of the right one.

If a requirement has nothing in your history to match it, leave it out of the letter rather than covering it with an adjective. Job descriptions list more than any one hire will have. I made the case for sending the application anyway in applying when you don't meet every requirement.

How do you explain experience from outside Canada?

Describe the work, give the reader enough context to judge its scale, and never open with an apology. A hiring manager here may not know your former employer, what your title meant there, or how big the work was, so tell them in one short clause. Then move on to what you did.

Three ways people get this wrong, and what to write instead.

• The apology. "Although I do not have Canadian experience, I believe my skills are transferable." It spends your first sentence on a weakness the reader may not have noticed. Write the evidence and let it stand.
• The unexplained brand. "At [a company the reader has never heard of], I led regional operations." The reader has no idea if that meant four people or four thousand. Add the scale: "a national logistics company with about 3,000 employees, where I ran operations for a region of 11 warehouses."
• The local title. Some titles mean different things in different countries. If yours would confuse a Canadian reader, describe the level plainly in the letter: "a team-lead role, managing six analysts".

There is also a legal backdrop to know about, though it is not something to argue in a letter. In Ontario, the Human Rights Commission's policy position is that a strict requirement for "Canadian experience" is discrimination on its face and can be justified only in very limited circumstances [3]. And since 1 January 2026, Ontario employers with 25 or more employees may not include any Canadian experience requirement in a publicly advertised job posting or its application form [4]. Both are Ontario rules. Neither means an employer has to hire you, and neither belongs in your cover letter. They do mean that when you write for an Ontario posting from a covered employer, you have no reason to treat experience from elsewhere as something to excuse.

There is much more on this, including how to talk about it in an interview, in our guide to getting hired in Canada without Canadian experience.

What should you leave out of a cover letter?

Anything an employer is not supposed to ask you about, anything already on your resume word for word, and anything that is about what you want rather than what they need. The first group is the one people get wrong without realising it.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission's guidance on application forms says an employer should not ask about age, other than whether you are 18 or over, should not ask about marital status, and should not request a photograph, because a photo can reveal information connected to grounds such as race, colour, sex or age. On citizenship, the question an employer may ask is whether you are legally entitled to work in Canada [2]. That guidance applies in Ontario; other provinces have their own commissions and publish their own.

If an employer should not ask for it, there is no reason to volunteer it. Leave out:

• your photo, age or date of birth;
• marital status, children, or family plans;
• religion, nationality, or place of birth;
• your Social Insurance Number;
• a full street address (city and province is enough);
• the story of your move to Canada, however much it shaped you. If an application asks whether you are legally entitled to work in Canada, answer that question where it is asked. The letter is for the job.

Then the second group, which is about space rather than law.

• A retelling of your resume. The reader has it open in the next tab. Use the letter for what the resume cannot say: why this role, why this company, and the three requirements matched to evidence.
• What you hope to gain. "This role would help me grow my career in Canada" is true and it is about you. Turn it around. What would you do for them in the first months?
• Salary. Leave it out unless the posting explicitly asks for your expectations. If it does, answer where it asks, briefly, and read our guide to negotiating salary in Canada before you name a number.

Should you use AI to write your cover letter?

Use it to draft, never to send. A tool can turn your notes into sentences quickly, and it can help you check whether you have used the posting's language. What it cannot do is know what you did, and a letter full of phrases like "I am excited to bring my passion and dedication" reads as unedited to anyone who reads fifty letters a week.

A test that works. Read each sentence and ask whether any other applicant could have written it. If the answer is yes, it is filler. Replace it with something only you could say, or delete it. A letter that survives that test is usually shorter, and it is always better.

Three mistakes we see over and over

These are the patterns that come up again and again when we review cover letters in coaching.

1. One letter for every job. The company name gets swapped and nothing else changes. Hiring managers can tell, because the letter answers a question their posting did not ask. If you are applying to two different kinds of role, you need two different letters, the same way you need two different resumes. Our guide on tailoring your resume to a target role explains how to set that up once instead of rewriting from scratch.
2. A strong resume, a weak letter, or the reverse. The two documents should tell the same story with the same numbers. If your letter says you managed a team of eight and your resume says six, the reader notices, and now they are wondering about everything else.
3. Burying the evidence. Three paragraphs of enthusiasm and one line of what you did, at the end. Put the evidence in the middle, in the bulleted block, where a skimmer lands.

A checklist before you send it

Run this once per letter. It takes about five minutes.

• The exact job title from the posting appears in the first paragraph.
• The hiring manager is named if you could find the name.
• Three requirements from the posting are matched to three pieces of evidence, with numbers where they exist.
• One or two sentences could only have been written about this company.
• Nothing personal that an employer should not ask about is in it.
• The numbers match your resume.
• It fits on one page with room to spare.
• It is saved as a PDF with your name and the role in the file name.
• You read it once as the hiring manager. Would you want to meet this person?

If your letters and resumes pass this list and the interviews still are not coming, the letter is probably not the bottleneck. The usual causes, and how to tell them apart, are in why you're not getting interviews in Canada.