Sending your resume into the void has never felt more useless.
Employers cut 92,000 jobs in February alone. Unemployment among entry-level employees peaked last July at 13.3%, the worst entry-level market in 37 years. Two-thirds of companies have put hiring on pause while they wait to see where AI can fill the gaps, and in the meantime, 1.17 million jobs have been cut since last year.
So you do what everyone does: You turn to AI to write a cover letter that slightly exaggerates the role you held in your junior year of college. That’s totally fine, since three-quarters of resumes never reach a human’s eyes anyway. This means you’re using AI to write something that gets read by AI, fulfilling some twisted ouroboros that Socrates and the lot would have had a doozy explaining to their students.
For Wharton Business Economics Professor Judd Kessler, there’s a simple alternative: Toss the fake enthusiasm and pick up the phone. The University of Pennsylvania professor and author of Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want instead thinks the cover letter’s days are numbered.
“I expect that in the not too distant future, cover letters are gone,” Kessler told Fortune. “Either cover letters will be required and everybody will have AI write good ones and they’ll be ignored, or employers will stop asking for them because they realize they’re not looking at them and they’re not adding value.”
Kessler says job hunting is starting to look a lot like the good ol’ days: It’s all about who you know. At the heart of his argument is the concept of a hidden market: any system that has to allocate something valuable without simply letting the highest bidder win. Think of Taylor Swift pricing concert tickets at $99 when millions of fans would pay 10 times that, or a university with 50,000 applicants for 2,000 freshman seats. Price alone can’t decide who gets what, so other rules take over—rules like knowing a roadie who can get you behind the stage, or having an alumni vouch for you. These are all signals in a hidden market.
And the labor market is one of the biggest hidden markets of all.
“We want to allocate scarce resources, and we don’t want to let price do the job on its own,” Kessler said. “We find it more efficient to have a search process where we identify the best person for the role.”
In this dynamic, signals like the cover letter used to matter, because it meant candidates were spending the time and making the effort to show their enthusiasm.
“It was a costly signal that a job candidate could send that they were really interested in a particular role,” Kessler said. “And it was costly because writing a good one was hard and took time, and you couldn’t do it for every firm.” The signal was hard to ignore: This candidate was serious; after all, they wrote a cover letter.
The AI ouroboros
That all changed when AI made it a quick snap to fake enthusiasm in three frivolous paragraphs.
“Generative AI comes, and something that used to take a few hours to do well now takes a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes,” Kessler said. “And all of a sudden that signal that used to be costly is now very cheap. Economists would call it cheap talk: You can make it look like you are really motivated to join that firm, that the job was designed for you, but you can create that signal very cheaply.”
The research backs him up. Kessler pointed to a study by economists Jingyi Cui, Gabriel Dias, and Justin Ye that tracked what happened when a major job platform introduced an AI cover-letter writing assistant. Letter quality improved because they were better targeted, and well-targeted letters led to more interviews. But as the tool spread, “employers stopped relying on cover letters in their hiring decisions,” Kessler said. “The cover letters got better, and they became a less useful tool overall.”
“In the old days, there used to be a few good cover letters, and that was how you could identify the best-fit candidates,” he said. “Now, all the cover letters pass some threshold. They become a prerequisite rather than a differentiator.”
Once every application looks polished, none stand out—and the rational employer either outsources the reading to AI or stops reading altogether. “That’s when you would hand it off to AI to be responsible,” Kessler said.
Kessler has watched it happen in his own hiring. Despite selecting research assistants at Wharton for the last 15 years, “all of the best cover letters have come in the last 12 months,” he said with a laugh, all of which suddenly reference his research papers.
“That used to be a way that I could tell who was actually motivated,” he said. “But now everybody does that, and my guess is it’s not because everybody has read that research. Everybody has figured out that AI can write a good summary of what I work on and weave that into a narrative. And that means I can’t use the cover letter as a good indication that somebody’s motivated to work with me.”
Instead of relying on an AI-written CliffNotes summary of his own research, Kessler now points to other hidden market signals: “Do they take my course? Do they come to office hours? Do they try to meet with me in person? Those are the signals I start to rely on more, because the cover letter is insufficient.”
A return to the coffee chat
The cover letter is dead, Kessler says and as a result, the signals are going old school: reaching out and classic networking.
“For the specific signal of ‘I really want to work at this firm,’ which is a signal that the applicant themselves can send, it’s going to be more things that cannot be replicated with AI,” he said.
“It’s going to be doing in-person networking with members of the leadership team at the firm, taking people that work at the firm out to coffee, going to the coffee chat that the firm has. And those are real costly signals, because they can’t be replicated with AI,” he added. “When I choose to go talk to people at a firm, I’m using hours that I can’t spend talking to people at another firm.”
While the coffee chat isn’t new, Kessler said the return to meeting people and showing other signals spells the cover letter’s inevitable end.
“I often describe this as the age of the cover letter being over,” Kessler said. “AI killed the cover letter.”
