Office Manager
Cover Letter Example

Interested in climbing the professional ranks and becoming an office manager? Your first step towards landing a lucrative management position will be to write an eye-catching office manager cover letter.

These cover letter writing tips will help you make a strong first impression, and land that interview.

1. Maintain a Professional Style

The key to writing a successful cover letter for an office manager position is by 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, make sure you use a professional cover letter template with a formal design. Then, open your office manager cover letter with a brief history of your most recent job experience. It’s important to demonstrate right up front that you currently possess skills that are applicable to a managerial position. For example, here’s how the candidate introduces their prior work experience:

Over my 5+ years working as an Office Manager at Express Inc., I accumulated extensive experience and skills in office management.

Highlight how long you’ve been working in upper management (if you have been) within your first few sentences. This gives hiring managers a glimpse into how quickly they will be able to onboard you into their company. Otherwise, use this valuable space to indicate why you’re prepared for a promotion into a leadership position.

Demonstrating enthusiasm towards the company that you’re applying to is a good choice for a closing sentence. It hints at that personable tone that we mentioned earlier, while still keeping it professional and without sounding robotic.

I wish to apply for this exciting opportunity at Michael Page, as this job aligns with my goal to utilize my unique skills in a respected multi-national company.

2. Keep It Concise, and Quantify Your Past Experience

While your resume provides a snapshot of your skills and prior job responsibilities, a professional cover letter allows you to elaborate on those same points.

Pick a few accomplishments that you feel really drive home the fact that you’re an effective leader, while at the same time keeping your cover letter down to one page. Don’t go overboard—300-450 words is enough for a cover letter.

Here’s an example of how the applicant uses quantification (adding numbers) to concretely display their accomplishments:

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.

As you can see, the job applicant in this office manager cover letter example was able to quantify the size of the team that they supervised. This provides hiring managers with a sense of scale related to their management experience.

3. Stay On Top With Upper-Level Formatting

In order to stay at the top of the application stack, your office manager cover letter needs an eye-catching format.

Typically, most applicants will simply write a few paragraphs about themselves and move on.

This mentality means that each cover letter starts to look the same after a while, and they’re more likely to be overlooked.

Give hiring managers a reason to stop and read your cover letter by breaking up the standard paragraph structure, and choose from our updated library of cover letter templates.

In our office manager cover letter sample, the applicant uses a similar format as (and lifts 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

Use bullet points to increase the readability of your office manager cover letter, and avoid the ‘wall of text’ appearance of everyone else’s.

As an office manager, your primary role will be delegating tasks and supervising employees. Hiring managers need to know that you’re a strong leader and effective communicator, and your office manager cover letter is a great first step.