The additional information box is not a cover letter

A different field with a different job

The additional information box is not a cover letter with a smaller label. It is a free text field that shows up on many application forms specifically for the things that do not fit anywhere else on the form: an explanation a screener needs but has no dedicated field to ask for, a scheduling constraint, a link to a portfolio when there is no dedicated portfolio field. Treating it as a place to paste your cover letter, or to write one when you were not otherwise planning to, misses what the field is actually for and often makes an application worse, not better.

What belongs in it

Use the box for information a specific field on the form does not capture and a reader genuinely needs before moving forward. A start date more than the standard two weeks out, if the role has a hard start date requirement. A note that you are also being considered for a different role at the same company, if that is true and relevant. A link to a body of work, a GitHub profile, a design portfolio, a writing sample, when the form does not have a dedicated field for it. A one-line explanation of an employment gap, if you have decided the gap is worth addressing at all and do not want to write a full cover letter to do it.

A concrete example: a candidate relocating from Chicago to Denver in six weeks, applying to roles now so the move is not a scramble, uses the box for exactly one sentence: "I am relocating to the Denver area in early October and available to start any time after that." That single sentence answers a real question a recruiter would otherwise have to ask in a screening call, and answering it up front can be the difference between a resume that gets a first look and one that gets set aside over an assumption about location that was never true.

A second example: the field doing a different job

Not every good use of the box is about explaining a gap. A software engineer applying to a company whose posting mentions a specific open source project the team maintains, and who has a merged pull request in that exact repository, uses the box for one sentence: "I have a merged PR in [project name] from earlier this year, linked here." That is a stronger, more checkable signal than almost anything else the applicant could add to the form, and it belongs in the box precisely because there is no other field on the application built to hold it.

What does not belong in it

A restated summary of your resume does not belong in the box, because the resume is already attached and restating it adds nothing a reader could not get faster by opening the actual file. Enthusiasm without content, "I am very excited about this opportunity and believe I would be a great fit," does not belong either, since it is the same sentence every applicant could write about every posting and it answers no question a screener actually has. And a full cover letter pasted into a text box built for two or three sentences tends to read worse than the same letter would as its own uploaded document, since a plain text box strips formatting and turns paragraph breaks into a wall of text.

How much is too much

The box is built for a text field, not a document, and the right amount to put in it is usually one to three sentences. If what you are writing runs past a short paragraph, that is a sign the content belongs somewhere else: as its own uploaded document if the form allows one, or cut down to the single sentence that actually matters if it does not. A wall of text in this field gets skimmed at best, the same way an overlong cover letter gets skimmed, and the one detail that mattered, the relocation date, the portfolio link, the line about a gap, is easiest to miss when it is buried in the fourth sentence of six.

None of this changes if the field is labeled something slightly different. "Anything else you would like us to know" and "additional notes" are the same field wearing different wording, and the same rule applies: short, specific, and used only when there is a real question it answers.

When leaving it empty is the right call

If nothing you would write in the box is information the reader actually needs, leave it empty. An empty additional information field is not read as a missed opportunity, because it is explicitly marked optional on nearly every form it appears on, in the same way a cover letter field usually is; a cover letter itself was optional on nineteen of the twenty real applications measured for this site and required on none, per do cover letters still matter. Filling an optional field with filler to avoid leaving it blank is a worse choice than leaving it blank, because filler is a small negative signal and blank is neutral. For the fuller picture of which fields across a whole application are safe to skip and which are not, see which application fields you can safely skip.

Where it sits on the form

This box usually appears near the end of an application, after the resume upload, after the cover letter field if one exists, and after the standard screener questions, which is worth knowing because it means whatever you write there is read last, by someone who already has the rest of your application in front of them. That is exactly why it should not repeat anything already covered: it is the one part of the form where repetition is most visible, since the reader just finished reading the version you are repeating. The full list of what a standard application form asks for, including where this field typically falls in the sequence, is in what ATS application forms actually ask for.

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