I’m frequently in contact with recruiters and when the topic of cover letters comes up, something interesting happens. Half of them declare that the cover letter is the most important part of any application. The other half tell me they never read cover letters at all.

In a world where we often hear of recruiters being bombarded with resumes for open positions, and where they openly admit to taking only 6-10 seconds on an initial scan of a resume, it makes sense that many might ignore cover letters entirely.

To be fair, in my experience with thousands of students and recent grads (and even seasoned professionals) most cover letters are overly generic and poorly written, so recruiters can’t be blamed for pre-judging and ignoring them as a strategic way to lighten their load.

At the same time, many recruiters, hiring managers, career coaches, and certainly most job seekers, would tell you the entire hiring process is broken. Most online applications result in resumes never being read (at least not by an actual person) and more than 80% of jobs are said to be found outside these systems, through networking. Recruiters are increasingly using tools like LinkedIn to find candidates precisely because the online systems most companies use result in overloads and bad matches.

Once you move “outside the system”, a recruiter receiving your resume will have no need for a cover letter. Once they review a resume received by email through networking, or found online, complete with a well written Professional Summary–or LinkedIn Summary section instead–they will have seen if there is a basic match, and make their decision to contact you, or not. The additional detail that used to come from the cover letter will come from an actual one-to-one discussion between real people. Your sales pitch matching you to the job, and telling the stories that illustrate why you are a fit, will happen in that conversation, not a cover letter.

And that is a huge advantage for job seekers as it is always easier to explain gaps in your experience, or other weaknesses, in a live conversation than it is on paper.

Every person and every search is different, and there will probably always be some time and place where a cover letter can be a valuable part of the process. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see the formal written cover letter become less and less necessary with each passing day. For 80% of job seekers, they already are.