Covering letter

[FredPuli43]

My daughter is going for a job as a PA in an estate agents. She passed the initial interview and was asked to provide two 'covering letters' for next time. She and I have no idea what a 'covering letter' is, though she has worked in estate agency before and has a degree which included property management.
Is this another term for 'references' or does it have some other, perhaps technical, estate agency, meaning of which she has been blissfully unaware ?

[commoner]

It's a letter written by the applicant which ...well look here..it will explain it better than I ever could....good luck with the job...:-)
http://www.prospects..../covering_letters.htm

[FredPuli43]

Thanks for that. It turns out that 'covering letter' is also the estate agents' expression for that blurb which goes with house particulars ! I'll tell her that they mean your version. She should write that. If she feels that she needs to do the other one as well, as proof that she can do that, she should, but common sense indicates that the two directors interviewing her next want the first, above all. After all, they haven't seen her yet; they only know that the first interviewer thought she was not so bad as to be a waste of the two directors' time seeing her.

[dotty.]

this means that she must have just provided her CV which gives no indication of her linguistic or grammatical ability. it is an employers way of eliminating time wasters and dolites who are just going through the motions and to identify people who have had their cv compiled by someone else possibly and are themselves not the literate and efficient character their cv might protray.

[Maydup]

If it were me I'd ask them which they need and avoid any chance of me getting it wrong, especially as the term covers both possibilities in her industry.

If she is through the first round, they could quite easily be asking her to write a blurb as an example of her skills and to take to the directors.

[FredPuli43]

Yes, Maidup,that was her thinking too;she will write a couple of the trade's 'covering letters', to show how she does it. She has experience of negotiating, her degree included valuation, inter alia, and this job involves some office management for negotiators. It seems that they want someone who knows the ins and outs of the business, understands it all, and can turn their hand to any part of it, if required. Showing that she can write a 'pitch' for a property would demonstrate experience in the business. She feels it's unlikely, when she's been sent by a recruitment agency and passed the first interview, that the two directors want now, at this stage, to see a 'covering letter' of the other kind .

Thanks.

[cathfromsaron]

ditto above replies!

the 'covering' part of covering letter just means a letter 'covering' or detailing what is in the PERSON SPEC or job advert ... nothing more complicated!