resume formatting

The letter cover format that survives ATS parsing and earns a hiring manager’s attention has six parts in a fixed order: header, greeting, introduction, body, closing, sign-off.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have a properly formatted cover letter using standard block-style business letter structure, saved in the correct file type for ATS screening, ready to submit in about 30 minutes.

MIT’s Career Advising office and Purdue OWL prescribe the same baseline cover letter structure: single-spaced, left-justified, 1-inch margins, 250 to 400 words.

Eighty-three percent of hiring managers say poor formatting cancels out the advantage of a strong resume. This tutorial gives you the exact format for a cover letter with specific margin, font, and spacing values, plus a section-by-section build order you can finish in roughly 20 minutes.

After following these seven steps, you’ll have a cover letter formatted to standard business-letter specifications, six defined sections, 1-inch margins, single spacing, and a total length between 250 and 400 words. Total build time: about 25 minutes if you already know what you want to say.

The correct letter format for a cover letter follows standard US business-letter conventions: block format, 1-inch margins on all sides, a 10-to-12-point professional font, and single spacing with a blank line between each paragraph. All of it fits on one page.

Indeed’s formatting guidelines specify one page, 10–12 point Arial or Helvetica, left-justified throughout. This step-by-step tutorial turns those specs into a reusable template for a cover letter you can customize for every application: five steps, about 30 minutes, no design software required.