You shook hands with the head of the team at a supplier review in March. In September the role appears on their careers page, and now you are writing to somebody who can attach a face to your name. That is a different letter from the one a stranger sends, and the difference lives almost entirely in the first two lines.
This is not the referral case, where a third party vouches for you and the letter has to carry their name credibly. Here nobody is vouching. You have your own few minutes of contact and nothing else, and the only real question is how much weight those few minutes can hold.
The reference goes in the first sentence, in one clause
Not the second paragraph. Not a postscript. If the person reading the letter has met you, that fact changes how they read everything after it, so it has to land before anything else does.
One clause is the budget. "We spoke at the Nantes logistics forum in March about your warehouse consolidation, and I am applying for the operations analyst role you posted last week." The meeting is established, the letter has moved on, and the reader is two seconds in.
What kills it is the paragraph version: three sentences reconstructing the conversation, a line about how much you enjoyed it, a compliment about their talk. Hiring managers read that as padding in front of the actual application. The fact that you met is worth real attention. The retelling of the meeting is worth none.
If your reference to the meeting takes longer to read than the meeting itself was worth, you have already spent the advantage it gave you.
Choose a detail from their side of the conversation
A vague mention is worse than no mention. "We met recently at an industry event" tells the reader nothing, proves nothing, and signals that you are working from a list of events rather than from a memory. It reads like a mail merge with a variable in it.
The detail has to be specific enough that it could only have come from that conversation, and it should come from what they said, not from what you said. What you said is not evidence to them, because they have no record of it. What they said is something they know they said, and reading it back is what triggers the recall.
- "You mentioned you were rebuilding the reporting stack in-house after the vendor contract ended."
- "You said the hardest part of the merger was that nobody owned the customer data."
- "You told me the team had gone from four people to eleven in eighteen months."
Each one of those puts the reader back in the room. Compare it with "we had a great conversation about data strategy," which puts nobody anywhere.
If you genuinely cannot recall anything they said, use the hard facts of the setting instead: the date, the venue, the person who walked you over, the stand you were both standing next to. Precision about circumstance is second best, but it is a long way ahead of warmth about nothing.
Write it so it still works if they do not remember you
This is the part almost everybody skips, and it is the whole craft of this letter. You remember the meeting because it mattered to you. They met forty people that week, and in plenty of cases the honest answer is that your name produces nothing at all.
So the opening clause has two jobs at once. To a reader who remembers you, it is a warm recognition. To a reader who does not, it has to read as a plain factual statement that costs nothing to accept.
The test is simple. Read your first sentence as if you had no memory of the writer. If your reaction is "I have no idea who this is and now I feel I am supposed to," the sentence is too demanding. If it is "sure, that was a real event, that does sound like something I said, let us see what he wants," you have calibrated it right.
Phrasings that fail the test: "as you will remember," "as we discussed at length," "following our conversation" with nothing else attached, "it was great to reconnect." Anything that asserts a shared memory puts the reader in a small social debt they never agreed to.
Phrasings that pass: "we spoke briefly at," "you may recall," "I was one of the people who cornered you after your talk on warehouse automation." That last one is better than it looks. It is honest about the asymmetry, it is mildly funny, and a reader who cannot place you is not embarrassed by it.
Old, social, or secondhand meetings
Time does not disqualify the mention, but it changes the framing. A meeting from two months ago can be stated flatly. A meeting from eighteen months ago needs the date said out loud, because a reader told only "we met at the Barcelona show" will assume you mean the most recent one and feel worse when they cannot place you. Write "at the Barcelona show in 2024" and you have handed them the reason they do not remember.
The purely social meeting is the delicate one. A wedding, a neighbour's barbecue, a parents' evening at school. The mention is still worth making, because recognition is recognition, but it has to be short and it must not be used as leverage. One clause, no familiarity, then straight into the professional case. The social context should not appear twice anywhere in the letter.
The secondhand case is the one where somebody walked you over, made the introduction, and you exchanged twenty words. Name the introducer and the occasion, and keep your own part small. "Claire Devos introduced us at the trade association dinner in May" is accurate, it gives the reader a second memory hook, and it does not pretend the conversation was more than it was. It is also the point at which this letter starts to resemble a referral letter, and it is worth deciding which of the two you are actually writing.
The failure mode that gets it binned
The letter fails when it reads as a claim on a relationship that does not exist. Hiring managers describe the feeling precisely: presumption. Somebody they cannot place is writing as though they are owed something, and the reflex is to close the tab.
The markers are consistent. First names when you only ever used the surname. "Catching up" when nothing is being caught up on. "As promised" when nothing was promised. Any suggestion that they encouraged you when they did not. And the quiet one, which is treating the meeting as your qualification, so the rest of the letter comes out thin because the writer believes the introduction has done the work.
There is one exception and it is a real one. If they explicitly told you to apply, that is not a claim, it is a fact you were handed. Lead with it and give it room: when they said it, which role they mentioned, what they suggested you emphasise. An invitation to apply is the closest thing to a warm lead this process produces, and it earns its own paragraph. Just be sure it happened. "Let us stay in touch" is not an invitation to apply.
One paragraph of credit, not a pass
A prior meeting buys attention for the opening and nothing after it. The evidence, the fit, the reason you want this specific job rather than the category of job all still have to be on the page. A tool like Postulit can turn your LinkedIn history into a clean CV so the document behind the letter is current, but the letter itself still has to argue its case.
In practice that means the meeting reference stays under thirty words and everything after it should be indistinguishable from a strong cold application. The employer's systems hold one version of you and the hiring manager holds another, much vaguer one. Your letter has to be legible to both.
So write it twice. Once with the opening clause, once without. If the version without the clause is weak, the version with it is weak too, and no amount of remembering you at a conference is going to rescue it. Fix the second version first, then put the clause back on top.