Why We Don’t Accept Resumes
– Jess P – Staff Writer
At Corporate Tools, we only ask for one thing with your application: a cover letter.
We don’t ask for traditional resumes because we think they’re the wrong hiring tool. A neatly formatted list of job titles and dates can tell us where you’ve been, but it can’t tell us whether you’d love working here.
So don’t spend hours polishing a resume for us. We won’t read it anyway.
We’d rather hear from you directly. A cover letter gives a chance to see the person behind the timeline and to understand why you might be a good fit for Corporate Tools.
Here’s why we ditched the traditional resume, what we’re looking for in a cover letter, and how to make yours stand out.
Why Cover Letters Work Better
Over the years, we’ve hired people with incredible resumes. Big-name companies. Impressive titles. Applicants who checked all the boxes on paper. Sometimes they worked out. Sometimes they were some of our worst hires.
That’s because the traits that make a person successful here rarely show up on a resume. We want coworkers who are ready to solve problems every day without waiting for someone to tell them what to do or falling back on the typical corporate playbook.
Anyone can assemble a chronological list of job titles, degrees, and responsibilities. But a cover letter gives us a glimpse of how you think, what matters to you, and what brought you to Corporate Tools.
So think of the cover letter as our first conversation. We want to know why you’re applying. What caught your eye? Why this role? Yes, we want to know your accomplishments, but tell us about them in a way that makes it clear why you’re proud of them. We’d much rather learn that than read another vague bullet point about increasing revenue by 17%.
How to Nail the Cover Letter
So, what does a great cover letter actually look like? There isn’t a secret formula, and we’re not looking for the person who’s best at marketing themselves. We’re looking for someone who communicates genuinely and gives us a sense of who they are and why they want to be here.
That might feel a little different if you’re used to submitting a resume and calling it a day. Good. We don’t want a polished template or a greatest-hits version of your career. We want your perspective.
Here are a few things you can do to give us more of what we’re actually looking for.
Research us
Some of the strongest cover letters we’ve received came from applicants who took the time to understand Corporate Tools before applying. Start with the job description, then dig into our website, blogs, and Company Principles. Get a feel for how we work and what we care about.
The best letters feel specific to us, not like something that could have been sent to 47 other companies. Tell us what caught your attention and why you want to work here. You don’t need to prove you memorized our website. Just show us you took the time to understand what kind of company you’re throwing your hat in for.
Tell us your story
We want to understand how you got to where you are today and what shaped the way you work. We don’t need some deep origin story. Tell us about a project you loved, a problem you enjoyed solving, or something you got curious about and couldn’t leave alone.
Maybe you’re an SEO expert who loves digging into why something ranks. Maybe you’re a developer who loves building things with friends. Maybe you’re a marketer who still thinks about that one campaign that really clicked. Those are the kinds of details that help us see how you’d fit into a place where people are expected to care about their work, take ownership, and follow their curiosity.
The best cover letters give us a sense of what you care about and what makes you want to do the work.
Talk to us like we’re human
Your cover letter should sound like you. Clear, genuine communication matters more to us than polished corporate language or a collection of trendy buzzwords.
Even in remote positions, you’ll spend a lot of your day explaining what you’re working on, sharing ideas, asking questions, and working across your team and other departments. So we need people who can speak their mind, ask questions, and do it all while treating everyone like humans. Your cover letter is your chance to show us how you communicate.
We promise humans will be reading it, so we’d like a human to write it.
Show us how you think
We’re interested in what happens when you’re handed a problem and there isn’t a clear answer. What questions do you ask? How do you decide what to try next? The examples you choose and the stories you tell give us a glimpse into how you work through problems and make decisions.
Tell us about a challenge you ran into, how you approached it, and what you learned. Or tell us about a time when asking more questions led to a better solution. Maybe you pushed a project to the finish line by taking ownership and figuring out what needed to happen next.
You don’t need to pretend that you know everything. We’re more interested in seeing how you work through what you don’t know and where you look for answers when the obvious solutions don’t work.
Conclusion
Corporate Tools isn’t a typical company, and we’re not looking for typical applications. We’re a group of curious, hard-working, slightly weird people who care about doing things well and building something we’re proud of.
We definitely want talent and experience, but more than that, we want people who can help us do more of what we do best: build cool out-of-the-box things to help business owners do what they do better.
So when you’re ready to apply, skip the resume. Skip the corporate template. Show us who you are and why Corporate Tools caught your attention.
If writing a cover letter like this feels uncomfortable, that’s okay. There are plenty of companies still running on the traditional playbook. Those places love resumes.