In Which I Try To Tumblr

I'm a seasoned sales and customer service representative (I have worked in a shop or fast food place) looking for new challenges matching my skillset (to work at your shop or fast food place).

My experience in (a basically unrelated job that I have also had during my patchy work history) taught me to (transferable skill), which (describe the positive effect the transferable skill or experience has or could have on a work task or desired personal quality that was listed in the job ad.)

(Repeat this formula for all of the main points the job ad makes about the job description and qualities of the desired candidate, or as many as you can. If you're running out of space, focus on things that wouldn't necessarily be obvious just from reading your CV. This sounds harder than it is. Usually, you literally just need to say stuff like "well, sometimes at my other job we were busy, which taught me to handle busy periods well in a work context without calling anyone a cunt sandwich or making a significant mistake. This will be applicable to this job since you mentioned that this shop also gets busy."

Talk about jobs you've had where possible, but also you can use school/college or other stuff you have done in your life. For example, if they have listed communications and basic IT skills, you can talk about being the person in your family that everyone comes to for help with their computers, and having to work out how to effectively communicate about computers with people who don't find that stuff as intuitive as you do. What you are doing here is creating a narrative in which everything about your life (including stuff that might seem not connected or unimpressive when it's just listed on a CV) seems to add up to you being the person they're describing that they'd like to hire for this job.

I guess a lot of the time I do know basically what info I want to convey, and it has overlap with the things you mentioned. E.g. I got a bachelor's degree in environmental studies, I've had some administrative and customer service-type jobs, some of those definitely did get busy, I learned to think independently, I would say I'm good at communicating and being organized, and my bosses (well, most of them) and coworkers have generally liked me for being a friendly person who cares about doing things properly.

The challenge is just saying all of this in well-flowing sentences that sound professional but not robotic or generic. Part of it is figuring out how to avoid repetition: I can't just keep repeating "that role helped me develop strong skills with [thing]."

If you're not applying to a job where "composing elegant prose" is a job skill, it probably doesn't matter much if it's repetitive or clunky, and it's probably better for it to be those things than to not contain that information in an easy-to-find way because, as you point out, managers are literally just skimming to check if the stuff they want to see is in there. If it helps, literally use bullet points.

Some ideas for how to phrase things more interestingly:

Actually describe what you did at the old job that taught you the skill - bonus points if this reveals a similarity between the roles that not everyone would realise. For example, in my job as a librarian I need to operate a cash register, which people wouldn't assume the job entailed from reading it on a CV, but which would be relevant if I was going for a job in a shop. So instead of saying that it taught me cash handling skills I could explain that I literally needed to operate a till etc as part of our selling off the old editions of books we'd replaced in our collection.

Start the sentence with the skill - e.g. "excellent customer service, in-person, over the phone and via email, is something I have plenty of experience providing, e.g. from my time at (employer) and at (2nd employer)," This makes it easy to spot when skim-reading.

Link two requirements together - e.g. continue the above sentence: "... where I also handled customer's private information with discretion, and needed to speak to people about difficult topics with sensitivity." or "... where I also needed to use persuasion to meet sales targets."

Also: typically you don't want to just have one generic cover letter, because that will feel generic. You want to be responding to what's actually written on the job description/ person spec for this particular job. (If you're having to do lots of applications, you'll find that points on the job description re-occur ; keep your old cover letters and Frankenstein new ones together from sentences and paragraphs you wrote previously.) You likely don't need to waste space telling them what your degree is unless you're going to relate it to an item on the job description/person spec; they presumably also have your CV.

"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"

or

"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"

and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)

they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)

they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)

they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)

they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)

they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)

they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)

they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)

the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)

you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:

natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)

being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)

random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)

you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up

and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.

I don't imagine anyone following me needs this to be explained to them, but I need to just make this post explaining this or I'm going to yell it directly at a stranger on the internet, and I'm trying to cut down on that. Not very successfully, I admit, but gotta start somewhere.