Comms Students Take Note: We Hire for Scrappiness.

Why some of Crafted's best hires came in from ice cream shops, retail floors, and roles that do not appear on a comms career page.

We put an entry-level role on LinkedIn late last year - and received more than 700 applicants. More than half had relevant resumes, with dozens having genuinely strong ones.

But what we see as qualifying for an interview is likely not what you would expect.

The pattern we keep seeing

After two decades of hiring, managing, and watching people grow, the strongest performers we have has non-linear paths. High school jobs. Wildly different summer work through college. And yes, at least one relevant internship. A stack of unrelated experience that turned out to be the actual training.

The ice cream shop teaches things resumes never capture: customer service, thinking on your feet, reading a room. How to manage pressure with a line out the door. How to figure things out when there is no playbook because no one has written one yet.

Abby Wambach, the former U.S. Women's National Team forward, has made the case in athletics: elite athletes excel across multiple sports, and specializing too early limits long-term growth. Careers run on the same principle. The early-specialized career is fragile while the cross-trained one is durable.

Why scrappiness matters in communications

Communications work is rarely clean or contained. Trends shift, news cycles move overnight, and clients change direction in week three of a six-week sprint. Budgets tighten the same quarter the launch closes, timelines compress, and yes, personalities often clash.

Scrappiness is what lets a junior comms hire adapt without panicking, move without overthinking, and find an opening where someone else sees a blocker. To be able to learn through watching your teammates, versus needing a playbook. To take initiative and not wait for assignments.

Cross-industry as a feature, not a gap

A resume that crosses industries reads as a problem to some hiring managers. To Crafted, it reads as a feature.

People who have worked across categories develop a wider business view: they have seen different customer expectations, management styles, and decision-making frameworks. They connect dots faster and challenge assumptions without ego. The high school retail jobs teach multitasking and customer psychology. An unrelated internship teaches context switching and humility. None of it shows up as a perceived strong credential, but all of it shows up in the work.

The difference is between waiting to be told what to do and asking what needs to be done. We bet on the second one every time.

Direct advice: work at an agency first

The most accelerating early move in a communications career is to work at an agency. You will learn more in a year than you will in two at most in-house roles, because you are working across clients, industries, tools, expectations, and personalities at the same time. The volume is the training.

It forces scrappiness.

What this has to do with the rest of the company

Crafted is small and senior by design - a purposeful, structural constraint. We do hire junior team, but as a majority senior team, they sit alongside us, learning and advancing quickly. Because we hire for scrapiness. The person hired on Monday is in front of a client by Thursday.

That is why the bar on scrappiness is the highest bar we set. It is also why our team holds. We hire people who have already proven they can work under conditions that are not perfect, and then we keep them by giving them work that challenges them, versus keeping them doing one singular comms function (reporting, pitching, etc.) for years.

The bet

In one sentence: we will take the person who learned by doing, every time, over the person who learned in theory.

Scrappiness is a skill. After more than 25 years of hiring against it, we think it is the most underrated one in the category.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Crafted hire for in entry-level communications roles?

Lived experience, judgment, and adaptability. A candidate with one directly relevant internship plus high school and college jobs in different industries signals more about future performance than a perfectly aligned, resume-building one.

Why is cross-industry experience an asset early in a career?

Early-career professionals who have worked across categories develop broader business judgment. They have seen different customer expectations, management styles, and decision-making frameworks. They context-switch better, challenge assumptions without ego, and learn faster.

Why do agencies prioritize scrappy candidates?

Agencies work under tight timelines, shifting scope, different personality types, and multiple client demands at once. Scrappy candidates handle ambiguity, move across accounts, and contribute value without long onboarding cycles - the exact pattern agency work requires.

How can a junior candidate demonstrate scrappiness during a hiring process?

Read the company's site, the team's recent work, and the client roster. Bring a specific insight in the first outreach note, not a generic introduction. Offer writing samples without being asked. Treat the application like a press pitch.

What is Crafted looking for that resumes do not show?

The capacity to think and do, to roll up sleeves, and to finish what no one is watching. The senior team has been working together for nearly twenty years. We hire for the next generation to continue Crafted on.