Page 66 - Carlson School GBCC Career Guide

Sample cover letter
PROFESSIONAL CORRESPONDENCE
Teresa Barns
1111 S 32nd Street • Minneapolis, MN 55404 • 612-555-5555 • youremail@umn.edu
January 6, 2019
Beth Riley
MBA Recruiter, University Relations Dish Network
9601 S Meridian Blvd
Englewood, CO 80112
Dear Ms. Riley:
I am tremendously excited to apply for the Senior Operations Analyst position with Dish Network. As a long-time customer of Dish Network, I would love to bring my operational skills to work for a company whose product I believe in. Beyond loving your product, I have also learned that I would fit in well with your culture after speaking with several current Dish Network employees and attending your Information Session here at Carlson. Carlson Alumni Joey Chen and Anna Bonnetski both noted that Dish Network has a relatively flat structure that rewards an entrepreneurial approach to improving the business. I thrived in an entrepreneurial role at Habitat for Humanity and look forward to bringing my drive and creativity to Dish Network.
From what I learned from your job postings and from my conversations with alumni, I think the successful candidate for Dish Network would need skills in three key areas: data-driven process improvement, communicating with senior management, and forecasting. In my past experience, I displayed an entrepreneurial drive to succeed in each of these areas.
• Process Improvement: One significant challenge we faced at Habitat for Humanity was to get the right number of volunteers with the right skills on the right day to each project. As a Program Manager, I pioneered the development of a regional “frequent volunteer” database that categorized each volunteer’s special skills according to the needs of house building and renovation projects. This database allowed us to forecast the skills we were missing from volunteer teams and quickly fill those needs on a given day, significantly reducing the problem of project downtime and making our projects much more efficient.
• Communication with Senior Management: Last year I had the opportunity to sit on a leadership development task force for Habitat’s national organization. This 20-person task force developed recommendations for 10 key ways the national organization could more successfully support its regional chapters, and we presented the recommendations to the national leadership team.
• Forecasting: I partnered with an external IT consultant at Habitat to develop a new dashboard to better track outreach from organizations wanting to volunteer for projects so that we could more accurately predict how many projects we could complete. This dashboard allowed Minnesota Habitat to complete 10 more projects than we had the year before.
I look forward to having the chance to show you my fit for Dish Network when you are here to interview on January 30. Please feel free to contact me if you need further information.
Sincerely,
Teresa Barns
MBA Candidate, 2020
Carlson School of Management
64 Carlson School of Management