This paper analyses job application letters written within the course of English for Specific Purposes, with an aim to determine students’ organizational and pragmatic knowledge. Job application letter was chosen due to the fact that it represents a genre with clear structure and formal conventions in addition to the fact that it is a document students are going to write in reallife situations, after their graduation. Development of pragmatic competence is a necessary element of ESP teaching since the use of linguistic forms needs to be in accordance with communicative goals and communicative situations which are specific for a certain profession. Quantitative and qualitative, descriptive analysis was performed on the corpus of 46 job application letters written by students of Information Technologies. Having in mind high percentage of letters in which mistakes were identified, the results undoubtedly indicate the need for a more detailed genre analysis and pragmatic competence development within ESP writing instruction. We believe that this may be accomplished by the use of authentic materials in target langugage, focusing on the genres which will be useful to students in real-life situations, as well as dealing with linguistic elements that contribute to a more formal, polite and indirect language use.