I've read that every cover letter is supposed to open with something like "I am excited to apply for this position" and I'm fairly sure every hiring manager alive has read that exact sentence four thousand times and stopped seeing it entirely.
What's worked better for me is giving an AI chatbot the actual job posting and my actual background — not a polished version, just the real details, like my sales experience across a handful of different industries and my current gig delivering packages — and asking it to find the specific overlap between what the job wants and what I've actually done, instead of writing something generic that could apply to any job at any company.
For a sales role I applied to recently, it picked out from the job posting that they wanted someone comfortable with rejection and quick follow-up, which is basically the entire job description of door-to-door sales, and helped me write two sentences about that instead of a vague paragraph about being a "hard worker and team player."
I still rewrote parts of it in my own words — a cover letter that reads like it came out of a machine is almost worse than a generic one, because it feels impersonal in a different way. But using the AI to find the actual connective tissue between the job posting and my own background, instead of starting from a blank page every time, cut the dread out of applying to yet another job.
If you're job hunting and dreading the cover letter part more than the actual application, that's a normal reaction to a genuinely tedious task. This won't make job hunting fun, but it takes the blank page out of it.
If you want the slow, no-jargon version of all this — the stuff I wish someone had handed me before I fumbled through it myself — that's exactly what I built On Ramp AI for. Check it out here.