After my last piece on the death of the cover letter, the most common reader question was the obvious one: so what should we send instead? I asked the same 22 hiring managers. Got back six suggestions. Tested all six across 60 applications over the last 30 days. Two outperformed. Two were neutral. Two backfired. Here is the data. The six substitutes The hiring managers offered six different post-cover-letter formats. Each is described in the form they use it. A 3-bullet "why this role" note in the application form's free-text field. Not a paragraph. Three bullets, each one sentence. Total under 80 words. A loom-style 60-second video introduction. Async, dropped into the application or sent in a follow-up email. A link to a relevant project + 2 sentences of context. The project lives on GitHub or a personal site. The 2 sentences explain why this project, for this role. A 200-word "what I'd want to work on first" paragraph.…