You have spent hours tailoring your cover letter, and then you freeze at the very first line. Who do you actually address it to? That greeting is the first thing a hiring manager reads, and it quietly tells them whether you did your homework or blasted the same letter to fifty companies. Getting it right is one of the cheapest wins in your whole application. A 2024 ResumeBuilder survey of 948 hiring managers found that only 26 percent read every cover letter, so the ones who do read are paying attention to details like this. This guide walks you through finding the hiring manager's name, when to use Dear [Name] versus Dear Hiring Manager, what to do when the name is nowhere to be found, and the tired salutations to retire for good.
Why the salutation matters more than you think
The opening line is prime real estate. It sets the tone before the reader has processed a single accomplishment. Address a person by name and you signal effort, research, and genuine interest in this specific role. Open with a stale, generic greeting and you signal the opposite, that this letter could have gone to anyone.
There is a useful parallel in email marketing, where the effect of personalization is measured constantly. HubSpot's research on personalization shows that tailored messages consistently outperform generic ones on the metrics that matter, from opens to replies. A hiring manager is a human reader too. A greeting written to them, by name, earns a few seconds of goodwill that a wall of "To Whom It May Concern" never will.
None of this means the salutation makes or breaks you on its own. It is a small signal. But small signals stack, and when a recruiter is skimming a stack of applications, the personalized ones read as the work of someone who wants this job, not just a job. If you want a refresher on where the greeting sits in the whole document, our guide on what a cover letter actually is lays out every part.
How to find the hiring manager's name
Before you settle for any generic greeting, spend ten minutes hunting for the real name. Most of the time it is findable, and the effort pays for itself. Here is where to look, roughly in order of how quickly each tends to work.
