How to address a cover letter with or without a name: 8 cases

A named person is the best address, and the name is often there to be found. Give it ten minutes, in this order.

1. The listing. Read to the end: a contact name often sits under "how to apply". A line such as "reporting to the Head of Finance" gives you a title to search with, and an address such as "f.adeyemi@" gives you an initial and a surname.
2. The company's team page. Look under "About us", "Our team" or "People" for the person whose title matches the one the role reports to.
3. LinkedIn. Search the company's name with the job title from the listing. A listing posted there sometimes shows who posted it.
4. Ask. Phone the main number or email the address in the listing. It is an ordinary question.

Subject: Question about the [job title] application

Hello,

I am applying for the [job title] role advertised on [where you saw it] and would like to address my cover letter to the right person. Could you tell me the name and title of the person handling applications?

Thank you,
[Your name]

If you end up with two possible names and cannot tell which is right, do not pick one. A greeting to the wrong person is harder to recover from than a greeting to no one.

Write "Dear", the person's title and surname, then a comma: "Dear Ms Adeyemi,". American business letters often use a colon in place of the comma, so follow the habit of the employer's country.

Titles

• Ms for a woman, unless she uses Mrs or Miss herself (in her email signature, for example). Ms says nothing about marriage.
• Mr for a man.
• Dr or Professor where the person holds the title. It replaces Mr or Ms: "Dear Dr Marchetti,".
• Mx where the person uses it on their profile or in their signature. Do not assign it yourself.

British style writes these without a full stop (Mr, Ms, Dr). American style adds one (Mr., Ms., Dr.).

When you are not sure of the title or gender

Use the full name with no title: "Dear Rowan Castellanos,". It is correct for anyone. Use it whenever the first name does not tell you, and do not work it out from a photograph.

Spelling

Copy the name from the listing or the company's site and paste it. Do not retype it. Keep accents, hyphens and capitals as the person writes them: Siân, Okonkwo-Reid, van der Berg. If you cannot tell which part of a name is the family name, use the full name in the order the company prints it.

First names

"Dear Priya," is right when the listing is signed with a first name ("Questions? Email Priya"), when you have already exchanged messages on first-name terms, or when the company's own writing is plainly informal. Otherwise use the title and surname: it is easy to relax in the next message and awkward to tighten.

Two forms are correct. "Dear Hiring Manager," fits any employer. If the listing names a team or department, address that: "Dear Customer Support Team," or "Dear Finance Department,". It is the more specific of the two, so prefer it when the listing gives you the words.

Leave out "Dear Sirs", "Hello there" and "Good morning" too (you do not know when it will be read). "Dear Recruiter" works only when a recruiter is the reader.

This advice is for English. In several other languages the equivalent of "Dear Sir or Madam" is the standard opening: see the last table in this guide.

For the rest of the letter, start with How to write a cover letter. For the sentence that follows the greeting, see How to start a cover letter.

An attached letter (a PDF or a Word file) carries a block above the greeting: your details, the date, then the reader's name, job title and company. Spell the name the same way in the block and in the greeting.

[Your name]
[Phone] | [Email] | [City]

[Date]

[Reader's name]
[Their job title]
[Company]
[Company's postal address, if you are sending the letter by post]

Re: [Job title], [reference number if the listing gives one]

Dear [Title Surname],

The postal address belongs on a printed letter. In a file you upload, the name, title and company are enough. The "Re:" line is optional, and useful when the employer is hiring for several roles at once. With no name, leave that line out and start the block with the team or the company. Layout and fonts are in Cover letter format.

In an email, drop the block and the date. The subject line does the work of the "Re:" line, the greeting is the first line of the message, and your phone number goes under your name at the end.

Subject: [Job title] application, [Your name]

Dear [Title Surname],

[Your letter]

Kind regards,
[Your name]
[Phone]

If you attach the letter to an email, the attachment keeps its block and the email is two or three lines under the same greeting. A form box with a character limit gets the greeting and no block. More in How to send a cover letter by email.

The greeting also sets the sign-off in British usage: "Yours sincerely," after a name, "Yours faithfully," after a greeting with no name. "Kind regards," works with both. See How to end a cover letter.

Each language has its own formal opening for a job application, and translating "Dear" word for word gets several of them wrong. Square brackets mark what to replace.

• French most often uses the title alone ("Madame,"). "Madame Lefèvre," with the surname is also used. "Chère Madame" does not belong in a formal letter. Cover letters in France has the full conventions.
• German adds a doctorate where there is one: "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. [Nachname],".
• Spanish ends the greeting with a colon, and Russian and Ukrainian end it with an exclamation mark, where English uses a comma.
• Portuguese forms here are those of Portugal. In Brazil the usual formal opening is "Prezada Senhora" or "Prezado Senhor".
• Italian "Spett.le" (short for "Spettabile") addresses a company or an office, never a person.
• Irish puts the name in the vocative, so Seán becomes "A Sheáin, a chara,".
• Japanese has no greeting line of this kind. The reader's name with 様 goes in the address block, and the letter opens with 拝啓 and closes with 敬具. For a department with no named person, write its name followed by 御中.
• Hindi and Bengali applications name the reader or the post in a block above the greeting (under सेवा में in Hindi and বরাবর in Bengali), so the greeting is the same either way. Bengali (as written in Bangladesh) also uses মহোদয়,.

Urdu and Arabic are not in the table: we could not confirm one standard greeting for each, and a wrong greeting is worse than none.