Office Manager
Cover Letter Sample

1. Maintain a professional style

The key to writing a successful cover letter for an office manager position is having a clear, professional tone. You want to appear personable, but not informal — you won’t be considered a serious job candidate or reliable leader otherwise.

First, use a professional cover letter template with a formal design. Then, open your office manager cover letter with a brief history of your job experience, emphasizing your relevant management skills.

Demonstrating enthusiasm toward the company that you’re applying to is a good way to end your cover letter’s opening paragraph. Showing excitement adds a personable tone that keeps your letter from sounding robotic.

Here’s how the candidate in the above sample introduces their prior work experience and expresses enthusiasm:

Over my 5+ years working as an Office Manager at Express Inc., I accumulated extensive experience and skills in office management. I wish to apply for this exciting opportunity at Michael Page, as this job aligns with my goal to use my unique skills in a respected multi-national company.

Continue blending formal professionalism with relevant elements of your personality until the end of your cover letter.

2. Keep it concise and quantify your experience

Build your cover letter around a few accomplishments from your resume that show you’re an effective leader. To make your accomplishments more impressive (and believable), quantify them with hard numbers.

Here’s an example in which the applicant quantifies the size of the team they supervised, giving hiring managers a sense of scale:

Given my responsibility to not only manage a team of five in a busy, medium-sized office, but also be primarily responsible for coordinating all office functions, I am accustomed to performing important tasks in a high-pressure environment.

Including your best accomplishments in your cover letter is important, but don’t go overboard. One page (300–450 words) is plenty for a cover letter. Employers screen hundreds of candidates for each position, so assume they won’t waste time reading a multiple-page cover letter.

3. Catch the hiring manager’s eye with standout formatting

To stay at the top of the application stack, your office manager cover letter needs eye-catching formatting.

Most applicants simply write a few paragraphs about themselves in their cover letters. After a while, each application starts to look the same to reviewers.

Get hiring managers to stop and read your application by breaking up the standard paragraph structure. Find a cover letter template that uses bullet points to increase readability by avoiding the “wall of text” appearance of everyone else’s cover letter.

In our office manager cover letter sample, the applicant uses bullet points taken directly from their resume:

Michael Page would benefit from my superior skills in the following areas:

• More than five years experience managing front and back office administration
• Serving as a reliable and trusted assistant to a number of senior executives
• Strong experience managing company budgets, policies, and procedures
• Supervising and hiring clerical staff; administering records management systems, event planning, preparing reports and presentations
• High computer proficiency including MS Office Suite, QuickBooks, and Lotus Notes

4. Showcase your leadership skills

As an office manager, your primary role involves delegating tasks and supervising employees. Hiring managers need to know you’ve got the combination of hard and soft skills required to effectively lead a team.

When you’re considering which skills to feature in your office manager cover letter, read the job ad. The skills listed in the job description are qualities the hiring manager is looking for, so prioritize adding those abilities to your cover letter.

Here are more common leadership skills to work into your cover letter:

• Computer skills
• Language skills
• Organizational skills
• Problem-solving
• Critical thinking
• Brainstorming
• Active listening
• Spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets)
• Budgeting
• Presentation skills
• Public speaking skills
• Communication skills
• Interpersonal skills