Hire on Grit and Curiosity, Not Perfect Resumes

Most internships filter on the wrong things.

They filter on GPA. They filter on major. They filter on which college you attend. They filter on whether you've had a "relevant" internship before, which creates the classic chicken-and-egg problem where you can't get an internship without having had an internship.

We filter on two things: grit and curiosity. That's it. If you have both, the rest is teachable. If you don't, no resume in the world will make up for it.

This article explains why, and what we actually look for in an application.

Why We Don't Care About Your Major

The best two interns we've ever had were an English major and a history major. The English major could write better cold emails on her worst day than most marketing majors do on their best. The history major could research a target company's leadership team faster than three senior salespeople combined, because his entire academic training was archival research applied to large unstructured datasets.

Neither of them had a "business" background. Both of them outperformed every business major we've hired since.

Here's the pattern. The skills that matter in modern B2B sales and operations are:

• Writing clearly. The strongest sales hires are people who can say a complex thing in 90 words.
• Reading carefully. Understanding what a 12-page RFP actually says.
• Researching efficiently. Finding the right person at the right company in 5 minutes.
• Synthesizing information. Turning 50 messy data points into a one-paragraph summary.
• Iterating quickly. Ship version one, get feedback, ship version two.

Every one of those skills is more cultivated by a liberal arts education than by a typical business curriculum. Liberal arts students read 80 pages a night, write three papers a week, and constantly defend a thesis under questioning. That is, in fact, the job description for an early-career B2B salesperson.

The business major might know what "EBITDA" means without looking it up. Useful, but learnable in an afternoon. The English major's six semesters of essay writing? That's a five-year head start that you can't make up.

What "Writing Clearly" Actually Means

Crisp writing is the highest-leverage skill in B2B sales. We say this on our internship page, and we mean it. Here's how to evaluate yourself.

Can you write a 4-sentence email that:

1. Identifies who you are in sentence one (and why the recipient should care)
2. States the problem in sentence two (from their point of view, not yours)
3. Proposes a specific small next step in sentence three
4. Closes with one signature line

If yes, you can do this job. If no, that's the muscle you'll build in the first 60 days of the internship. Either way, the bar is concrete and learnable.

You do not need to be a professional writer. You need to be able to read an email aloud and notice when a sentence is bloated, when a paragraph is repeating itself, when a CTA is buried. If you have ever rewritten your own essay because the first draft felt long, you already have the instinct.

What "Curious About AI" Means in Application

You don't need to be a coder. You don't need a CS minor. You don't need to have built an LLM. We mean curiosity at a much lower bar than that.

The bar is: when you encounter a problem, is your reflex to try ChatGPT or Claude first? Or is it to ask someone else?

If your reflex is the former, you're going to thrive in this internship. The AI tools we use will become muscle memory in 30 days because they're already adjacent to your existing habits.

If your reflex is the latter, that's fine, but it's the first behavior we'll work on. Some people are wired to outsource thinking to a search engine or a coworker. We're going to rewire that into a habit of outsourcing it to an AI assistant first, because the iteration loop is faster.

Curiosity, in this context, means you're willing to keep poking at the tool until it does what you want. Not give up after one bad output. Not blame the tool. Not assume "it doesn't work for my use case." Keep poking.

What "Quiet Hunger" Means

One line on our internship page that gets noticed: "we want quietly hungry, not LinkedIn-influencer hungry."

Here's what that means. There are two failure modes for ambitious young people.

Failure mode 1: They post about hustle on LinkedIn three times a week. They have an "MVP" they've been working on for 11 months. They have a podcast. They have a personal brand. They have a Substack. They do not have shipped work, real revenue, or a portfolio of actual projects.

Failure mode 2: They are bright and capable but too cool to want anything. They turn down work because it's "not aligned." They negotiate to do less. They are passively waiting for the perfect opportunity.

Neither type works in our environment.

The type that does work: someone who has a quiet, unannounced bar of "I want to be the best at this." Who shows up early without being asked. Who reads the docs without being told. Who tries the AI tool one more time when others would give up. Who, when given vague instructions, comes back with something specific. Who, when their work gets critiqued, says "thanks, what else" and goes back at it.

This isn't loud. It doesn't show up on LinkedIn. But you know it when you see it, and it's the most predictive trait we've ever encountered for early-career success.

What We Look At in an Application

The application form has the usual fields: name, contact info, school, major, grad year. We look at those, but mostly for logistical reasons. The questions that actually decide outcomes:

1. How quickly did you submit the application? If you saw the listing and applied within 24 hours, that's a useful signal about responsiveness.
2. How well-written is the optional cover note? Most applicants skip this. The ones who write one well move to the top.
3. Do you respond to our follow-up email within a business day? The biggest filter. Most people don't.
4. In the screening call, can you articulate why this internship vs another? Generic answers go to the bottom. Specific ones move forward.
5. Did you ask any questions? Curiosity reveals itself in the questions you ask, not the answers you give.

Notice what's not on that list: GPA, prestige of school, brand-name companies on your resume. Those are not predictive of success in this environment. The behavioral signals above are.

Apply

If you've read this far and you think you might be a fit, apply below. Any major. Any school. Any GPA. The application takes 90 seconds and we respond to every applicant within five business days.

If you have grit and curiosity and you write clearly, we want to meet you. That's the entire bar.