Start a cover letter with a named greeting and a first sentence that names the role and your single most relevant proof. Address it to the hiring manager by name whenever you can find one, because a name is the cheapest evidence that you read more than the job title. When no name exists anywhere, write "Dear Hiring Team," or "Dear Engineering Hiring Team," rather than "To Whom It May Concern," which reads like a letter that was mailed to a hundred companies at once.
The shape of an opening
You are starting two things, and only one of them is the hook
Ask how to start a cover letter and you will get advice about hooks: an arresting first line, a story, a bold claim. That advice skips the part that actually gets judged first. Before anyone reads your first sentence, they read the line above it, and that line either has their name in it or it does not.
So treat the opening as two separate jobs. The greeting says whether you looked into who you are writing to. The first sentence says whether you understood what they need. Both are short. Both are cheap to get right. And a reader who sees a name they recognise in the greeting is measurably more patient with everything that follows, because the letter has already stopped looking like a broadcast.
The rest of this guide handles them in that order, because that is the order the reader hits them in. Find the name. Choose the greeting. Then write one sentence that could not have been sent to any other company.
Finding the name
How to find the hiring manager in about five minutes
Do not spend an hour on this. Work down the list, and stop the moment you have a name you can defend. If none of it turns anything up, that is a real answer too, and the next section tells you what to write instead.
Read the posting to the very bottom.
The name is in the listing itself more often than people expect. Look for a contact line, a "report to" line, a recruiter signature, or an application email address that is a person rather than a mailbox. A posting that says you will report to the Head of Design has just told you which page of the site to open next.
Open the company team or about page.
If the role reports into a specific function, the person who runs that function is usually listed. A small company will often have the whole team on one page. This is the fastest legitimate way to turn a department into a person, and it takes one click from the careers page you were already on.
Search the company site for the job title.
Try the department name plus the word lead, head, or manager. Engineering blogs, press pages, and conference bios leak the org chart constantly. If somebody at the company wrote the post announcing that they are hiring, that is very often the person who will read your letter.
Check who posted the job.
On most job boards the listing carries an author or a poster. If a named recruiter posted it, address the letter to them. A recruiter who is screening the applications is a completely legitimate recipient, and getting their name right is worth as much as getting the manager right.
Ask, if you have anyone to ask.
If there is a recruiting inbox, a referral, or an agency contact, a one line question is normal and nobody minds it: who should the cover letter be addressed to. People answer this. It costs you a day of waiting and it buys you a name.
Verify before you use it.
One wrong name is worse than no name at all. Check the spelling, check the current job title, and check that the person still works there. If you are not confident enough to say the name out loud in an interview, do not put it in the greeting.
The greeting
Every greeting people use, and what each one signals
Ranked roughly from strongest to weakest. The Folio column is what the cover letter draft in Folio actually produces, because the greeting is not guesswork in the template, it is filled from the hiring manager field you type in.
| Capability | Folio | What it signals | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dear Jordan Lee, | Produced whenever you fill in the hiring manager field. | You looked. You are writing to a person, not to a company. | You found a name and you are confident it is current and spelled right. |
| Dear Ms Lee, | Type the honorific and surname into the same field and the draft uses it verbatim. | Formal and correct, if you are certain about the honorific. | Conservative fields like law, finance, government, and academia. |
| Dear Design Hiring Team, | Type the department team into the hiring manager field and the greeting follows it. | No name, but you clearly know which team you are applying to. | The search turned up nothing, but the function is obvious from the posting. |
| Dear Hiring Team, | The automatic default when you leave the hiring manager field blank. | Neutral and modern. It does not pretend to know something you do not. | No name, no obvious department, and a panel is likely to read it. |
| Dear Hiring Manager, | Available by typing it in, though the department version usually reads better. | Slightly generic, but perfectly acceptable and very common. | You know one individual will read it, you just cannot name them. |
| To Whom It May Concern, | Never generated. It is not in the template at all. | A form letter. It tells the reader the letter was not written for them. | Almost never. Keep it for a reference or a bank letter with no known reader. |
| Dear Sir or Madam, | Never generated. | Dated, and it guesses at gender in front of someone who can see you guessed. | Only where local convention still expects it, and even then a team greeting is safer. |
| Hi there, or Hey, | Never generated. | Casual to the point of careless for a first contact with a stranger. | Only when the company writes that way and you already know someone there. |
One rule outranks all of these: if the posting tells you who to address it to, do exactly that. An instruction in the listing is also a quiet test of whether you read the listing.
No name, no problem
What to write when there is no recipient at all
Every version of this question, answered plainly. None of these situations require you to invent a person.
No name
Who do you address a cover letter to if there is no name?
The team. "Dear Hiring Team," is the plain answer, and "Dear Marketing Hiring Team," is better when the posting makes the function obvious. Do not fall back on a title you invented, and do not guess at a person you are not sure about.
No contact
What if there is no contact information anywhere?
That is normal, and it is usually deliberate. Companies route applications through a form precisely so that individual inboxes stay clear. A missing contact is not a hint that you should track someone down through a side channel. Greet the team and move on.
Recruiter
The posting came from an agency or a recruiter.
Address the letter to the recruiter by name if you have it, because they are the first reader either way. If the end client is confidential, write to the recruiting team and keep the letter about the role as described, not about the company you suspect it is.
Your address
Does a cover letter need your postal address?
No. Your name, your email, your phone number, and one link are what a reader will actually use. A full street address on a document that is going to be read on a screen is a habit inherited from paper mail, and nobody is posting you a reply.
Their address
Does a cover letter need the company address?
No. The formal block with the company name and its street address is optional in almost every modern application. It is harmless if you include it, and completely unmissed if you do not. Nobody has ever rejected a letter for lacking a postcode.
Sir or Madam
Is "Dear Sir or Madam," ever right?
It is legible, it is polite, and it is thirty years out of date in most markets. It also asks the reader to notice that you guessed. If a formal register is genuinely expected where you are applying, a department team greeting gets you the same formality without the guess.
The first sentence
Make a correct opening specific in one edit
A conventional first line is not the problem people say it is. Stating the role you are applying for is clear, correct, and exactly what the reader expects. What separates a letter that lands from one that does not is the clause you attach to that statement.
Start from the plain, correct version.
Something like: I am writing to apply for the [role] at [company]. That sentence is doing its job. It is unambiguous, it survives every applicant tracking workflow, and it is the sentence a draft should hand you. Treat it as the floor, not the ceiling.
Find the one line in the posting that is the actual job.
Skip the boilerplate about culture and benefits. Find the sentence that describes the problem they are hiring to solve, usually buried in the middle of the responsibilities. That sentence is what your reader has in their head when they open your letter.
Attach your proof to the role, in the same sentence.
Extend the plain opening with a because, a where, or a semicolon: I am writing to apply for the [role] at [company], where the posting asks for someone who can [the actual job]. That is the work I have been doing at [employer] for the past [time], and here is the result it produced.
Delete anything that is only about you.
I have always been passionate. I was excited to see. I believe I would be a great fit. These sentences are true of every applicant, so they persuade nobody, and they push your one good clause below the fold. Cut them and the letter starts one sentence earlier.
Read the first two lines cold.
Cover the rest of the letter and read only the greeting and the first sentence. If those two lines could be pasted into an application at a different company without changing a word, you have not started the letter yet. You have only warmed up.
Openings that work
How to begin a cover letter, with examples of each pattern
The direct match. Name the role, then name the requirement you already meet. "I am applying for the [role] at [company]. The posting asks for someone who can take a support queue that grew faster than the team and make it predictable again; that is the problem I have spent the last two years on at [employer]." Plain, and impossible to send to anyone else.
The referral. If you have one, it goes first, because it is the strongest sentence available to you and it stops being useful once the reader has scrolled past. "[Name] on your [team] suggested I write to you about the [role]." That is the whole opening. Nothing you could write instead of it would work harder.
The evidence-first opening. Lead with the result, then land the role. "Last year I rebuilt the onboarding flow that had been quietly losing half the signups it received. I am applying for the [role] at [company] because the posting describes the same problem at a larger scale." This one is strong when your best proof is genuinely close to what they asked for, and it is weak when it is not, because it forces a comparison you may lose.
The specific-observation opening. This is the one people attempt and botch. Flattery is not an observation. "I have long admired your commitment to innovation" is flattery, and it is worth exactly nothing. An observation is concrete and slightly risky: something you noticed in the product, in a shipped feature, in a public write-up, and a sentence of your own thinking about it. If you cannot be that specific, use the direct match instead. There is no shame in it, and it beats a bad hook every time.
Where Folio fits
The draft hands you a safe opening, and you make it yours
Folio builds a cover letter from the same profile that already powers your resume, so the letter arrives with your real roles and your real results in it rather than a set of blanks. The recipient block and the greeting are not guesswork: type a hiring manager into the field and the letter opens with their name, leave it blank and it opens with "Dear Hiring Team," which is the safe default. The template has no route to "To Whom It May Concern," because there is no application where that is the strongest available option.
Be clear about what that does not do. Folio cannot find the hiring manager for you. There is no company database, no directory lookup, no LinkedIn connection behind the field, so the five minutes of searching described above is still your five minutes. What the product removes is the blank page and the format anxiety, not the research. The generated first draft comes from an external model and you approve every line before it goes anywhere, which is worth knowing before you paste anything sensitive into any tool, ours included.
One thing to know before you compare tools: getting the finished letter out of Folio costs nothing. Both documents, the resume and the letter that matches it, export to PDF and DOCX on the free tier. The file carries no watermark and the download button carries no upgrade prompt. Free is blunt about the trades it does make. Your site sits on a portfolio.wrxstack.com address rather than a domain you own, it carries a small Made with Folio credit, and AI drafting stops at 10 generations each month. Those are the limits. Downloading what you wrote is not one of them.
Frequently asked questions
Who should a cover letter be addressed to?
The person who will read it, by name, whenever you can establish who that is. In order of preference: the hiring manager for the role, the recruiter who posted the job, then the specific team, then a generic hiring team greeting. The reader you are writing to is a real individual with a real inbox, and addressing them as one is the cheapest advantage available in the entire letter.
Who do you address a cover letter to if you have no name?
Write "Dear Hiring Team," or, better, name the function: "Dear Product Hiring Team,". Both are current, both are professional, and neither pretends you know something you do not. Never invent a name and never guess one from a directory you are not sure about, because a letter addressed to someone who left the company two years ago is worse than a letter addressed to nobody.
Is it still acceptable to write "To Whom It May Concern"?
It is understood, and it is the weakest greeting you can pick. It signals a letter written once and sent everywhere, which is exactly the impression the rest of your letter then has to fight. Keep it for documents with genuinely unknowable readers, like a reference letter or a bank statement request, and use a team greeting on a job application instead.
How do you write a cover letter when the posting gives no contact at all?
Address the team and stop worrying about it. A missing contact is nearly always a deliberate choice by the company, not an oversight for you to route around, and no hiring process penalises a letter for greeting the hiring team. Put the effort you would have spent hunting a name into the first sentence instead, which is the part that is actually being evaluated.
What is a good first sentence for a cover letter?
One that names the role and then immediately connects it to the specific thing the posting asked for. Stating that you are applying for the job is fine and correct on its own; what makes it work is the clause after it, where you point at the requirement in the listing and say that this is the work you have already been doing. A first sentence that could be pasted into another application unchanged has not started yet.
Does a cover letter need an address on it?
No. Neither your street address nor the company address block is required in a modern application, and leaving both out costs you nothing. Your contact line needs a name, an email, a phone number, and one link worth clicking. The formal address header is a leftover from posted mail and no reader will miss it.