Angular/MongoDB/Node.js Express local application for quickly composing a cover letter that contains important keywords and technology on the job listing(s) that you provide. You can use this tool to figure out what keywords appear most frequently in a job description, and quickly add paragraphs from your previous cover letters that discuss those important keywords.
Install Cover-Letter-Snippets with npm i cover-letter-snippets
(Note: Some users may have to install globally npm i -g cover-letter-snippets)
Enter the command snippets to run the program.
This will start a localhost server that will serve the application on localhost:3141. A browser will open automatically.
The easiest way to save your cover letter snippets is to store them in a JSON file. Click "Connect to JSON File" to create a file that you can read from/write to.
If you'd like to use Cover Letter Snippets across computers, store your data in an Mlab Database. Follow the instructions here: (Setting up a database)
First, paste the URI (including UN and Password) from your Mlab database and click "Connect to Database".
If you want to play around with the app, there is an existing database URI string in the form field. Please be a good person or I will have to take it out.
From here you can Add Snippets to your database or Build your cover letter.
Snippets uses a MongoDB database on Mlab.com to store your cover letter snippets data.
- Go to mlab.com and sign up or log in.
- Click "Create New" under deployments.
- Choose AWS and the Free Sandbox plan.
- Pick a region and name your database.
- Follow the prompts to submit and create your database.
- Click on your new database.
- Navigate to the users tab and click the button to create a new user.
- Fill out the username and password.
- copy/paste the MongoDB URI for your database and enter your username/password in the appropriate place in the URI.
Copy/Paste a small snippet of a previous cover letter covering one or more related skills, and fill out the categories field with the keywords that you want to match to the job description. (Comma Separated, no spaces.)
It's also important for you to add an 'intro' and 'outro' category, so that you can add intro and outro snippets easily.
On the "Database" page, you'll see a table with a list of all of the cover letter snippets in your database.
From here you can click on each individual snippet or list of categories to edit them. Click off the table to save.
First, copy/paste a job description into the textarea field and click "Parse Job Description". The application will check if any of the words in the job description match any of your snippet categories.
A table of results will be returned where you can see how many times a category has been mentioned. Click on the "Show Snippets" link to see the snippets that match those categories. ie. If you're applying for a Java Developer position, you should probably see a lot of matches for the category "java", and those are the important snippets that you want to add to your cover letter first.
Once you see snippets from a category, you can add those snippets to your cover letter, and also see the intro and outro snippets you added earlier.
Once you're done arranging your snippets in the cover letter table, you can press the export button.
You're basically done! You can edit the text in the textarea, and you can copy/paste your cover letter into your word doc or PDF that you're submitting with an application.
If you'd like to help, there's a ton of work that can be done to improve the product. Clone the repo and make a pull request! Off the top of my head, here are some things that can be done:
- Show Intro Snippets automatically after parsing job description
- Add button to show more snippets even if they haven't been mentioned in job desc.
- Create a fixed div as a sidebar that shows the parsed job description when you're adding snippets.
- Create an array of aliases for category names (ie. a job description listing 'RoR' or 'Ruby/Rails' would match your category of 'rails'. Each category and aliases would have to be set up by the user individually.)
- Sort addable snippets by which ones have the most relevant categories in the job description.
If you're looking to build a quick and easy resume, check out Best Resume Ever - I created the purple theme, which was based on how I styled my own resume. Check it out!
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