Is it the done thing these days to email a covering ‘letter’ and then just attach the cv?

it is best practice to do this but may not be necessary as your covering letter should not have any information that is not in your CV

I would suggest you do

In PDF format.

Just follow their instruction.

🙂

Only instruction is please send your cv and covering letter to email@address

I always thought cv was fact based and the covering letter was for the ‘I think i would be great at this job because…’ bit but I’ve only ever applied for jobs that required application forms before.

It’s just a bit of preamble to say “here’s my CV” really.

Dear sirs, I would like to put myself forward for the position of Ferret Wrangler which I saw advertised in December’s edition of Ferret Wrangling Monthly. I have been wrangling ferrets for ten years and so I believe that this position would be an ideal match for my skillset. Please find herewith a current copy of my CV for your consideration. Yours Faithfully, Reginald Fetherington-Smythe Esq. (deceased)

Send the covering letter as a ‘document’ rather than in the body of the email

Always looks nicer when printed off

Why would they need to print it off? It just tells them what you’re applying for; so HR know to send it to the Head Ferret Wrangler rather than a stoatally different department.

They’ll then collate all the CVs for that post; they wouldn’t need (or want) a hundred covering letters all saying variations on “please to be giving me this job kkthxbi”.

You’re wasting your time, they’re all ferkin weasels in HR. Everyone knows that.

The instruction looks pretty clear to me – attach a covering letter and a CV separately ( and presumablly in Word so they can make charges if they want to.)

You could write the covering letter as the email – but that doesn’t seem to be what they are asking for.

Read the job description . and / or person spec, then paraphrase that in your covering letter:

I would make an excellent ferret wrangler becasue I have a + b + c.
So they know to consider you in one paragraph, instead of scanning your whole CV to find the relevant bits.

Letter/CV in pdf. Brief preamble in email.

PDF so it doesn’t get changed accidentally/on purpose, and you can be (more) sure the formatting won’t get mangled.

Even more uncertain now than when i first asked, was hoping for some sort of consensus

Consensus- do what Cougar said in the email text and in a separate attached covering letter as requested. Sound enthusiastic and Good luck.
Edit- cv and letter in pdf as mentioned above.

My covering letter more or less says “Here is my CV for job X”, with some polite spacefiller.

pdf also looks more slick; hidden tables are hidden and you know it is more difficult for someone to tamper/edit it.

It looks more like a letter on your screen than a Word document 🙂