You’re not imagining things — the job market is a mess right now. The hiring rates from May 2024 to July 2025 have ranged from 3.2% to 3.5%, the lowest since the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of August 2025, there were more than 1.9 million long-term unemployed individuals in the U.S., defined as those who have been job-seeking for 27 weeks or more. That number has been gradually increasing since the start of 2023.
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Standing out in this challenging market requires candidates to think creatively. Take cover letters, for example. They take a long time to customize for each position, and companies may not even read them if they’re not required.
An engaging and out-of-the-box alternative is what job seekers are calling the “brag doc” — a summary of your major wins at work.
What Is a Brag Doc?
A brag doc is a record of every time you’ve made an impact at work. Maybe your presentation helped your team land a new client. Or perhaps you made some changes to the workflow and got a challenging project in before the deadline. No accomplishment is too big or too small.
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How Do You Use a Brag Doc?
The first draft of a brag doc is just for you. Think of it as a resource library you can pull from to create a role-specific presentation. It’s like a cover letter, but better.
Start by listing all the big wins you can remember to date. Don’t worry if you can’t recall everything right away. Sit down and mentally review your career on a project-by-project basis as best you can, noting accomplishments as they come to you.
Once you’re done brainstorming, review each win and write down the details. Start with your recent accomplishments, since these will be the most relevant to potential employers.
Write out a description of:
- The project
- Your role at the time
- The approximate dates
- Your contribution
- Your impact on the project or organization
Be as specific as possible, just as you would on your resume. You didn’t just “save the team time and money.” You reduced production costs by 35% and shortened the project completion time by 10 days.
Formatting and Sharing Your Brag Doc
Your initial brag doc is just for you, so you can format it in any way you want. Word documents are easy and convenient, but you might find that spreadsheets keep everything more organized. Notion, for example, has a prebuilt template that’s free to download.
The brag doc you send to employers should be a bit more polished. Recruiter Maddie Machado uses a slide deck and showcases a beautiful example on her TikTok account.
Creating a deck lets you customize your brag doc for a specific role, even adding keywords from a job description. Plus, it shows off your presentation and design skills. Create or find a template that you like, and you can reuse it for every role.
Don’t worry if an application doesn’t accept deck formats in the cover letter field. Export your deck as a PDF and upload it where you’d attach a cover letter PDF. Your out-of-the-box format is now a pleasant surprise — and, hopefully, so is your impressive background.
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Ditch the Cover Letter — A ‘Brag Doc’ Could Be How To Land a Higher-Paying Job Fast
