How to Address a Cover Letter When You Don't Know the Hiring Manager's Name

The best cover letter salutation is "Dear [First name Last name]" or "Dear Mr./Ms. [Last name]." A personalised salutation signals that you've done basic research — which is itself a signal about how you approach work.

Finding the hiring manager's name usually takes two minutes:

LinkedIn: Search the company name plus the likely job title of whoever would manage this role. Most hiring managers are findable this way. If the posting mentions the team or department, search for the department head.

The job posting itself: Many postings include the contact name, especially from smaller companies or direct employer postings.

The company website: Team pages, About pages, and leadership sections often list the relevant person.

Email the recruiter: If you're corresponding with a recruiter, ask directly: "Who would be the hiring manager for this role? I'd like to address my cover letter appropriately." Most will tell you.

If you find a name, use it. "Dear Sarah Chen" is always better than any generic alternative.

Sometimes you genuinely can't find the hiring manager's name — the posting is through a blind agency, the company is private with no online presence, or the recruiter won't disclose. In these cases:

"Dear Hiring Manager" — this is the current standard. Clear, professional, and widely accepted. It tells the reader you know who you're writing to in functional terms even if you don't know their name.

"Dear [Team Name] Team" — useful when the posting makes the team clear ("We're hiring for the Data Science team..."). "Dear Data Science Team" is slightly more targeted than the generic alternative.

"Dear Recruiter" — acceptable for a cover letter submitted to a recruiting agency rather than directly to the employer.

These are all professional and none of them will hurt your application. What matters is that you choose one and move quickly into a strong first paragraph — the salutation is five words, the opening paragraph is what gets you read.

Some cover letter salutations actively work against you.

"To Whom It May Concern" — outdated. It dates from an era when letters were physically mailed to organisations without a specific recipient. It signals that you didn't try to find the right person and signals low effort.

"Dear Sir or Madam" — also dated. The binary assumption is increasingly out of step with professional norms, and the formality is more suited to a Victorian legal letter than a professional job application.

"Hi there" or "Hello" — too casual for most professional contexts, unless you're applying to an organisation with a demonstrably informal culture and you have direct evidence of that culture from your research.

No salutation at all — jarring. Even in a brief email cover letter, include a salutation.

"Dear [Company Name]" — you're applying to work with people, not an entity. The company isn't reading your letter; a person is.

The rule of thumb: "Dear Hiring Manager" is always safe. Personalise when you can; use the professional default when you can't.

If you've found a name but aren't certain of the person's gender or their preferred honorific, there are two clean options:

Use the full name without an honorific: "Dear Alex Johnson" rather than "Dear Mr. Johnson" or "Dear Ms. Johnson." This is professional, impossible to get wrong, and increasingly standard.

Use first name only: "Dear Alex" — slightly less formal, but entirely acceptable in most modern professional contexts, especially in tech, startups, creative industries, and international companies.

What to avoid: guessing the gender from the name and getting it wrong. "Dear Mr. Chen" to a woman named Lee Chen is a worse impression than "Dear Lee Chen." When in doubt, first-name-only or full-name-without-honorific is safer.

If you're writing in a formal industry — law, finance, government, traditional professional services — "Dear [Full Name]" without an honorific is still more appropriate than first-name-only. Match the tone of the industry.