Title: Cover Letter Initials
General Information about Item:
- Verbal Folklore: horror stories
- English
- Recorded in the US
Informant Data:
- Andrew Wolff is a junior at Dartmouth College and a Quantitative Social Science major from New Jersey. His mother is a college advisor and his father a sales representative for medical journals. He is a brother in the Alpha Chi fraternity, is involved in TAMID, a Dartmouth consulting group for Israeli start-ups, and organized the Dartmouth Model UN Conference. He is currently planning on joining a consulting firm after graduation, and became involved in corporate recruiting during his Sophomore Summer after hearing about it from his brothers at Alpha Chi.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context: This interview was recorded in an audiofile during a one-on-one, face-to-face interview during the Dartmouth Fall 2016 quarter.
- Cultural Context: Corporate recruiting involves an initial documents phase where the candidate needs to submit typically a resume and cover letter before being considered for interviews. A cover letter needs to be specifically addressed to each company, detailing usually why one wants to work for that company, what one likes about the company, and what one thinks one can contribute to the company based on past individual experiences.
Item:
- Andrew has a friend who named all the cover letters addressed to different companies that he was applying to according to the companies’ initials instead of their full names. Accordingly, because some companies shared the same initials, the friend accidentally submitted the wrong cover letters to several companies with identical initials.
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTAf70kcAJc
Transcript of Associated File:
- “I have a friend who had sent… who named all his cover letters by the initials of the company and a couple companies had the same initials and he accidentally sent the same cover letter to three different firms.”
Collector’s Comments:
- Most corporate recruiting horror stories begin with statements of anonymity, like “I have a friend…” generalizing the experience and avoiding any conclusion on the listeners’ part that this embarrassment actually happened to the person retelling it.
Collector’s Name: Aime Joo
Tags/Keywords:
- Corporate Recruiting Folklore; horror stories; verbal folklore; cover letter