You already sweat over your resume so the software would read it correctly. Now you are staring at that second upload box, the one for a cover letter, and wondering if it even matters. Does anything happen to it, or does it vanish into a folder no one opens? The honest answer is more useful than a simple yes or no, so let us walk through where your cover letter actually goes.
The short answer: yes, it goes in, but it rarely decides anything alone
When people ask "do ATS read cover letters," they usually mean two different things at once. Does the software store and process the file? And does it screen or reject you based on what the cover letter says? Those are not the same question.
Here is the plain version. Most Applicant Tracking Systems do capture your cover letter, store it with your application, and often make its text searchable. But in the large majority of setups, the automated matching and ranking runs on your resume, not your cover letter. So your cover letter goes through the ATS in the sense that it is stored and readable, yet it almost never acts as the gate that filters you out on its own.
That matters because it changes who you are really writing for. You are not writing to beat a machine. You are writing for the recruiter who may pull up your application after your resume earns a closer look.
Where your cover letter actually lands inside the system
An ATS is the software employers use to collect and organize applications. When you apply, the system attaches every file you submit to your candidate record. Your resume, your cover letter, and anything else all live there together.
What the software does next depends on the platform, and different companies run very different systems, including Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo, and iCIMS. We can only speak to common, documented behavior across these tools, not the private inner workings of any one vendor. In general, three things can happen to a cover letter once it is stored:
- It sits as an attachment that a recruiter can open and read, but that is not broken into searchable fields.
- Its text gets parsed and added to the pool of words a recruiter can search across when hunting for candidates.
- It is pasted directly into a text box on the application, in which case it is captured as plain, searchable text from the start.
Notice that in two of those three cases, the words in your cover letter are searchable. That is the real reason to take it seriously, even if it never gets a formal score.
Does the ATS score or rank your cover letter?
This is where a lot of bad advice lives. You will read that you must stuff your cover letter with keywords to satisfy the algorithm. For most systems, that is simply not how it works.
The automated relevance scoring that some ATS platforms offer is built around the resume and the structured application fields, because that is where skills, titles, and dates live in a predictable shape. A cover letter is free-form prose, which is much harder to score reliably, so most configurations do not rank you on it. What the cover letter can do is show up in a recruiter's keyword search. If a recruiter searches their applicant pool for "bilingual" or "Salesforce administrator," and those true words appear in your letter, your application can surface. That is a real benefit, and it is very different from an algorithm auto-rejecting you for a missing phrase.
So the useful mental model is this. Your cover letter probably will not get you screened out by software, and it probably will not get you auto-advanced by software either. Its job is to be findable, readable, and persuasive to the human who reads it.
How you submit it changes what the software sees
The single biggest variable is how the application asks for your cover letter. Match your approach to the box in front of you.
- A paste-in text field. The text is captured cleanly and is almost always searchable. Formatting mostly disappears, so write in short, plain paragraphs and do not rely on bold or bullets to carry meaning.
- A separate file upload. Treat this file with the same parsing hygiene as your resume, because the same parser may read it. Use a standard file type the portal accepts, a common font, and a simple single-column layout.
- A combined document. Some flows ask for one file containing both resume and cover letter. If you do this, put the resume first so the parser hits your structured experience early, and keep the whole document clean.
- An optional field you can skip. If the posting says optional and you have something specific and genuine to say, include it. A generic letter adds little, but a targeted one can only help when a human reads it.
A quick example
Say Maria is applying for an operations coordinator role. The job description repeatedly mentions "vendor management" and "process documentation." Maria has genuinely done both, but on her resume those live inside dense bullet points that are easy to skim past.
In her cover letter, she writes two plain sentences: "At my last role I handled vendor management for eight suppliers and cut late deliveries by a third. I also rebuilt our process documentation so new hires could onboard in days instead of weeks." Now those exact phrases exist in searchable text, tied to real results she can defend. If a recruiter searches the applicant pool for "process documentation," Maria's file is more likely to appear. She did not trick anything. She just made true words easy to find.
How to format a cover letter the software can read
If there is any chance your letter gets parsed, the rules are the same boring rules that protect your resume. None of this requires design skill.
- Use a single-column layout with normal top-to-bottom text.
- Skip tables, text boxes, columns, and graphics. If it matters, do not hide it in a structure a parser might skip.
- Keep your name and contact details in the body text, not in the document header region, which some parsers ignore.
- Stick to a common font like Arial, Calibri, or Georgia.
- Save as a standard file type the portal accepts, never as an image or a scan, because an image has no readable text layer.
If you want to see how any file reads once the design is stripped away, Bounce built a free tool called Beat the Bots that shows you the literal text a parser pulls out of your document, the X-ray view. You can run your resume through it at careerbounce.io to catch a scrambled layout before you apply.
What actually matters: write it for the person, honestly
Once you stop fearing the algorithm, the cover letter becomes what it was always meant to be, which is a short, direct note to a human. Mirror the real language of the job description where it truly fits your experience, name the specific role and company, and give one or two concrete proof points you could explain out loud in an interview. Do not pad it with keywords you cannot back up, because a letter that oversells collapses the moment someone asks a follow-up question.
This is the same principle behind everything Bounce makes. Bounce Studio can draft a cover letter that mirrors a job description using only your real experience, so it never invents a skill or a tool you do not actually have. The point is a letter you can stand behind, not one you have to hope no one reads closely.
The honest bottom line
Do cover letters go through the ATS? Yes. They are stored with your application, and depending on the system and how you submit them, their text is often searchable. What they rarely do is score you, rank you, or reject you on their own. So format your cover letter cleanly enough that the software can read it, then spend your real energy making it honest and specific for the person on the other side. That is the version that helps, because everyone bounces back, and it is easier when the words you submit are ones you can defend.