Cover Letter Checker

Yes, it is free, and you do not need an account: paste your letter and the full report appears on the page. To keep the checker fast for everyone, there is a limit on checks per hour and per day.

You sign in with Google only if you choose to continue to Dovira and have your letter rewritten for the job.

No. A check does not save your letter, the job posting or your resume. They are sent to OpenAI to run the check and are not kept by Dovira. The check keeps only technical records without your texts, such as the score and the number of words, and a salted hash of your IP address that is used for rate limits and cleared by a daily cleanup once it is more than two days old.

If you continue to Dovira, we keep your texts for up to 48 hours to set up your workspace, then delete those copies. Once you have continued, the job posting becomes a job in your Dovira account, the resume you added becomes your career profile if you do not have one yet, and the rewritten letter is saved as your cover letter for that job. Your original letter is used only for the rewrite and is not kept.

Yes, even when they are optional. In its article How to Write a Cover Letter, Harvard Business Review answers whether you need one: “And yes, you should send one.” A 2025 HBR tip adds that many companies no longer require a cover letter, but “a well-written, well-structured cover letter could set you apart from the competition.” And the Harvard guide says that when a letter is optional, submitting a strong one “almost always helps, especially for competitive roles.”

A good letter answers the job posting, says something specific about the company and the role, proves its points with results and agrees with your resume. Those are what the eight checks look at, and 80 or more gets the verdict “Send it”.

Without the checker, read it out loud. The Harvard guide suggests asking whether it sounds like you and says “something specific about this company and role”; if it sounds “stiff or generic,” revise it.

The checker suggests a letter of 250 to 400 words in three or four paragraphs and flags anything outside that range, more strongly when it is under 150 or over 500 words.

The range follows common advice: Indeed calls 250 to 400 words “the right amount” unless the employer has asked for something else, and the Harvard guide says to aim for 250 to 400 words in three to four paragraphs. If the posting sets a limit, follow the posting.

Use the hiring manager’s name if you can find it, on the company website or LinkedIn. If not, “Dear Hiring Manager” or “Dear Hiring Team” is fine. Skip “To Whom It May Concern”: the Harvard guide advises against it, and it tells the reader the letter was not written for them.

The checker reads the greeting itself: “To Whom It May Concern”, or no greeting at all, gets a remark under Personalization and limits that check to 1 of 2 points.

Yes, if you paste the job posting. The Job match check compares the main requirements of the posting with your letter and lists the ones it does not cover, and the role and the company named in your letter are checked against the posting.

Two of the eight checks need more than the letter: Job match needs the posting and Backed by resume needs your resume. Without them, those two checks stay locked and the score counts only the others.

Workday, Greenhouse and Lever do not document scoring, ranking or rejecting you on the text of a cover letter. If the application has a cover letter field (employers decide that per job), the applicant tracking system (ATS) collects your letter with your application. The AI matching those vendors document reads your resume, and their automatic rejections come from the answers to application questions. Do Cover Letters Go Through ATS? sets out what each vendor’s own documentation says.

The checker does not imitate an ATS and gives no ATS score, so it cannot tell you how a given employer’s system handles your letter.

What it does check is your letter against the posting: whether it covers the main requirements and uses the posting’s own words for the role, the tools and the skills where they are true for you. That is the Job match check, and it needs the job posting.

The checker does not try to work out how a letter was written. It looks at what the reader sees: the Language & tone check marks phrases that sound generic, clichés, weak verbs and a tone that does not fit the job, whoever wrote them.

If you start from an AI draft, that is the part to rework. The Harvard guide warns that recruiters are increasingly good at spotting unedited AI letters, whose language “tends to be generic, overly formal, and oddly similar across applicants”, and suggests rewriting the draft in your own voice.

Yes, ChatGPT can review a cover letter, and it is a fair second opinion. With it, you write the prompt and the criteria yourself each time, so what you get depends on how you ask.

Dovira is our product. The Dovira checker applies the same eight checks and a score to every letter (two of them need the job posting or your resume), compares the letter with the job posting and with your resume when you add them, and marks the passages of your letter the remarks are about. If you want, you can then rewrite the letter for the job in Dovira.

If you would rather ask ChatGPT, here is a short prompt that follows the same eight checks:

1. Act as the hiring manager for the job below and review my cover letter against the job posting and my resume.
2. List the 3 most important requirements of the posting and quote the sentence of my letter that proves each one, or write “missing”.
3. List the claims in my letter that my resume does not back up.
4. Rate my letter 0, 1 or 2 on: job match, backed by resume, personalization, opening and close, evidence, length and structure (250 to 400 words, 3 or 4 paragraphs), language and tone, correctness.
5. Suggest the 3 changes that would improve the letter most. Do not invent experience I don’t have.

Paste the job posting, your resume and your letter after the prompt.

Yes. In the UK, the letter that goes with your CV is often called a covering letter; in the US it is a cover letter, sent with a resume. The checker works the same for both: paste your covering letter and the job advert, and add your CV as text or as a PDF, DOCX, DOC or TXT file of up to 4 MB.

The one the posting asks for. Otherwise, the Harvard guide recommends a PDF with a standard font such as Arial, Calibri or Georgia at 11 or 12pt, one-inch margins and no graphics, colored text or creative layouts, unless you apply for a design role. If the form has a text box for the letter, paste it as plain text and check that the paragraph breaks survive.

The checker reads the text of the letter you paste, not the file you will send, so check its layout yourself before you send it.

80 or more gets the verdict “Send it”, 55 to 79 “Fix first” and under 55 “Rewrite”. Only the checks the checker could run count, so a letter checked without the job posting or the resume gets a partial score.

If yours is low, start with the critical remarks: they come from the checks with 0 points, where there is the most to gain. Edit the letter and check it again, or have Dovira rewrite it for the job from your report.

No. The check gives you a report, and you decide what to change. To get a new version, press “Continue with Google — rewrite” under the report: you sign in to Dovira, and it rewrites the letter for the job posting from the remarks of the report. If the check had no job posting, you paste it first.

With your resume, Dovira is set up to use only the facts in it and to tone down or remove the claims it does not back up; without a resume (in the checker or in your Dovira profile), it is set up to keep to the facts already in your letter and add no new employers, titles, dates or numbers. The rewrite is one of the three cover letters of the free plan.