We all know that recruiters are both searchers and screeners. They’re looking for the best talent and looking for reasons to eliminate people who don’t fit the bill. In the quest to be the best looking candidate, a good cover letter can do some heavy lifting.

Here are just two of 28 ways your cover letter can give you an edge:

1. Don’t be satisfied with one cover letter for one recruiter. Conventional wisdom says you should be. If the job is attractive, the hiring manager is receiving hundreds of resumes. Sending a bunch of cover letters will only annoy the hiring manager.  And that’s only true if you send the same cover letter. Then you’re the dog barking at the door. So, don’t. Send something different, something valuable.

Follow-up mailings, or “multi-step campaigns” as they’re called in direct mail, are scarily effective, as long as you’re offering new value each time. And follow up can be your most valuable tool. As long as the follow up isn’t just “when will I hear back from you” but rather, “here’s something I know that can make your life go a lot better.”

Go look over the companies you’ve already applied to. Then use Google News to figure out what’s happened in the industry that is critical to the manager. Better yet, set up a Google Alert for companies as you apply to them and write them back every time you hear news that you can help with. Sometimes a good cover letter is the third one you send, that arrives just when they need it.

2. Use powerful testimonials. Most resumes don’t include testimonials. They’re supposed to be impersonal. But great sales copy is loaded with personal endorsements because they’re very convincing. It’s called social proof. Basically, we care what other people think. So where do you put testimonials? In your cover letter.

Be discriminating though. Typical endorsements can sound formal or stilted. “I know Dave to be an excellent data analyst and processor.” Really? A good cover letter has something more conversational. Instead of listing out testimonials, weave short snippets of your best comments into your story. “One of the most gratifying things a colleague ever said about me was “Every project gets better when Raj is involved.”

With the fierce competition in this job market, having 217 applications on the street does you no good at all if each of them is mediocre. There are so many candidates, just one or two of them will create great packets and beat you every time.

That leads to three axioms:

3. You can make yourself the obvious choice for the job and attract many offers, but to do it, you must be the candidate who maximizes every portion of your job packet to attract the recruiter’s attention, so

4. You must have a system that enables you to write a cover letter that is optimized to get you calls, and

5. Your system needs to be automated so it creates cover letters very rapidly and very easily so you actually do it every time (and don’t simply intend to do it).