What a generated draft actually gives you
Staring at a blank cover letter after just finishing a resume is its own specific kind of tired. Craftume's cover letter builder shortcuts the blank-page problem: once you've built a resume on the site, opening its Cover Letter tab and generating a draft pulls directly from the resume data you already entered — your work history, your listed skills, the company and job title you tell it you're applying for — and assembles a starting structure you edit from there.
It's worth being precise about what this is and isn't. It's not an AI writing a persuasive letter about you from scratch — Craftume doesn't use AI or paid third-party writing APIs anywhere in the product. It's a rule-based assembly of a draft using the real information already in your resume, organized into a cover-letter-shaped starting point. That distinction matters for how you should use it: as a fast first draft that saves you the blank page, not as a finished letter you download unedited.
Step 1: Build or open your resume first
The draft generator pulls from resume data, so it needs a resume to pull from. Start (or open an existing resume) from the templates gallery, and make sure your work history and skills are filled in — the more complete your resume content, the more useful the generated draft will be, since it has more real material to assemble from.
Step 2: Open the Cover Letter tab from your resume
From within your resume, open its cover letter section. Fill in the company name and the job title you're applying for — these get woven directly into the draft, so getting them right (correct spelling of the company name especially) matters before you generate anything.
Step 3: Generate the draft
Click to generate — the tool assembles an opening, a body built from your resume's experience, and a closing, using your actual resume data as the source material. What you get back is a real starting structure, not a blank template with placeholder brackets to fill in yourself.
Step 4: Rewrite the opening line
This is the single most important edit to make by hand. A generated draft's opener is necessarily generic, because it's assembled from structured data rather than written with knowledge of why you specifically want this job at this company. Replace it with something specific — see the companion piece on cover letter openers for five concrete approaches. This is the line most likely to be read closely, and it's the one part of the letter a generator genuinely can't write for you, because it requires something outside your resume data: your actual reason for wanting this particular role.
Step 5: Add one real story the draft couldn't know about
The generated body draws from your resume's structured content, which means it inherits the same limitation resume bullets have — short, compressed, achievement-focused, but not narrative. Pick your single most relevant accomplishment and expand it into two or three sentences of real context: what the situation was, what you decided to do, what happened. This is the part of the letter doing work a resume bullet structurally can't (see the companion piece on writing a cover letter that doesn't just repeat your resume) — the generator gives you the compressed version to start from; you're the one who un-compresses it into something worth reading.
Step 6: Add a genuine "why this company" paragraph or sentence
The generator has no way to know why you specifically want to work at this employer, because that information isn't in your resume data — it's specific to you and this one application. Add a sentence or two here yourself: something real about the company, a product you've used, a mission you're aligned with, or a specific challenge in their industry you understand.
Step 7: Check it against the job posting
Before finalizing, compare your edited draft (and your resume) against the actual job posting's language. If you want a systematic check specifically for keyword overlap rather than just a general read-through, the ATS Resume Scanner can help you spot terms from the posting that neither document currently uses, if they're honestly true of your background.
Step 8: Read it out loud once before sending
This catches two things a silent read-through often misses: sentences that were auto-assembled and read slightly stiff once spoken aloud, and any leftover generic phrasing that survived your edits without you noticing. If a sentence sounds like it was clearly generated rather than written, that's your cue to rewrite it in your own words.
What the tool is good for, and what it isn't
Good for: skipping the blank page, getting a structurally sound draft fast, ensuring the letter's factual details (company name, job title, your actual experience) are accurate from the start since they're pulled directly from data you already entered.
Not a substitute for: the specific reasoning about why you want this particular job, a genuinely narrative story about one accomplishment, and a close final edit. Those three things are what separate a letter that reads as generic from one that reads as considered — and they're exactly the parts that require you, specifically, thinking about this one application.
FAQ
Do I need an account to use the cover letter builder? You need a resume built on Craftume first, since the draft pulls from its data — but building a resume itself doesn't require an account (see the companion formatting guides for more on how the builder works generally).
Can I edit the generated draft freely, or is it locked to the resume data? It's fully editable — the generated text populates an ordinary text field you can rewrite, add to, or delete from freely, the same as writing from scratch, just with a head start.
Will the draft be different if I change my resume afterward? Regenerating pulls fresh from whatever your resume currently contains, so if you significantly update your resume, regenerating (or manually updating the letter to match) keeps the two documents consistent with each other.
Is the generated draft unique, or does it produce similar output for similar resumes? Because it assembles from your specific resume data (your specific jobs, skills, and companies), two different people's drafts will differ in content — but the underlying sentence structure is templated, which is exactly why the manual edits in steps 4 through 6 matter so much for making the final letter sound like you rather than like a template.
Can I download the finished cover letter as a PDF? Yes — once you're happy with your edits, the same tab that generated the draft lets you download the finished letter as a PDF, matching the resume it's paired with.