How to Address a Cover Letter

The salutation is the smallest decision in a cover letter and the one people spend the longest on. Here is how to find a name in five minutes and what to do when there is not one to find.

Finding the name

Four methods, in order of effort.

One: read the posting properly. A contact name appears more often than people notice, sometimes in the application instructions, sometimes in the small print about accommodations or queries.

Two: check the company’s own site. A team or leadership page will often let you identify who the role reports to. For a specific function, the head of that function is usually the right recipient even if they are not the direct hiring manager.

Three: see who posted the job. On professional networks, postings frequently name the recruiter or hiring manager who published them. That is a legitimate use of public information.

Four: ask. Call the main line or email the general address and ask who the role reports to. This works more often than people expect and takes two minutes. Frame it as wanting to address your application correctly.

If none of the four produces a name in about five minutes, stop looking. The salutation is not worth an hour.

When you cannot find a name

Use a collective address. In descending order of preference:

• Dear [Function] Hiring Team. As in “Dear Operations Hiring Team”. Specific enough to feel considered.
• Dear Hiring Team. Warm, normal, safe.
• Dear Hiring Manager. Entirely acceptable and extremely common.
• Dear [Company] Recruitment Team. Fine for large employers with a central function.

Two to avoid.

To Whom It May Concern. Not offensive, just dated. It reads as a form letter because for decades it was on form letters.

Dear Sir or Madam. It guesses at the reader’s gender and offers them two options, one of which is wrong. There is no reason to introduce that when a collective address is available.

Purdue’s job search writing resources cover the conventions here in more depth, and the direction of travel across all of them is towards naming a person or a team rather than using an archaic formula.

Handling the name once you have it

Use the full name. “Dear Alex Mercier,” is correct, safe and increasingly standard in professional correspondence.

Avoid Mr and Ms unless you are certain. You usually are not. A name does not reliably indicate gender, and getting it wrong is a worse outcome than the mild formality of using the full name. If the person’s own signature or bio uses a title, follow their lead.

Do not guess at pronouns or titles from a name. Many names are unfamiliar to any given reader, and inference is unreliable. The full name sidesteps the problem entirely.

Respect earned titles where they apply. “Dear Dr Adeyemi,” is correct if they hold a doctorate and the context is academic, clinical or research. Elsewhere, the full name is fine.

Spell it correctly and check the order. Copy and paste it rather than retyping. Name order conventions differ across cultures, so if you are unsure which part is the family name, using the full name as written avoids the problem.

Punctuation and format

Small conventions, applied consistently.

• Comma after the salutation in general business correspondence: “Dear Alex Mercier,”
• Colon in strict formal US business style: “Dear Ms Mercier:”
• Either is correct. Pick one and use it in the whole letter.
• Capitalise Dear and the name. Do not capitalise “hiring team” mid-sentence, but do in a salutation: “Dear Hiring Team,”
• No “Hi” or “Hello” in an attached formal letter. Both are fine in an accompanying email to a person you have already spoken to.

Addressing an email versus a letter

The rules diverge slightly.

An attached letter follows business convention: “Dear Alex Mercier,”.

An email body can be a little warmer, particularly in a reply or after contact: “Hello Alex,” or “Hi Alex,” where the relationship supports it. For a cold application email, stay with “Dear”.

If you are attaching a letter and writing an email, do not use two different salutations that contradict each other in tone. See the job application email guide.

The recipient block

If you are writing a formal letter with a full address block, put the recipient’s name, title, organisation and address above the salutation, left aligned. If you have the name but not a street address, name and organisation is enough; nobody is posting it.

For an emailed letter, the block is optional and often omitted, which is fine.

What never goes near the salutation

Two things.

A guess at anything personal. Do not infer or reference gender, marital status, age, nationality or anything else about the reader. Beyond being unnecessary, these are the characteristics the EEOC identifies as prohibited bases for employment decisions, and volunteering assumptions about them is a poor first line.

A leftover from a previous application. The single most damaging salutation error is the wrong company or the wrong name, carried over from the last letter. Change it first, before anything else, and check it last.

A thirty-second routine

1. Search the posting for a name.
2. Check the company site for the function head.
3. If found, copy and paste the full name after “Dear”.
4. If not, use “Dear [Function] Hiring Team,”.
5. Before sending, reread the salutation and the company name.

Step five is the one that matters most.

Related

For the rest of the letter, see the cover letter outline guide, how to start a cover letter and how to end a cover letter. For cold outreach with no posting, see cover letter versus letter of interest.

Or let the cover letter generator handle the boilerplate, free at Kazifi.