Writing to a Company With No HR Department
There is a category of employer where none of the usual machinery exists: nine people, no recruiter, no scorecard. The person reading your letter is the person you’d work for, and they’re reading it on a phone between two other jobs they also have to do today.
Small studios, single-site clinics, independent agencies, family firms, local charities. If the posting has a typo in it and the email address is somebody’s first name, you’re in this category. Write differently.
What actually changes
Your letter is the whole first impression. No screening layer reduced you to a spreadsheet row before a human saw you. Whatever the reader thinks at the end of your email is what you’re judged on.
They are not hiring a role. They’re hiring relief from a specific pile of work currently landing on someone who is drowning in it. This is the single most useful thing to understand. Big companies hire against a job architecture; small ones hire because something broke last month.
Generic is instantly visible. A large employer receives so many applications that a competent generic one blends in. A nine-person company reads them all, and the one addressed to Dear Hiring Manager about your interest in a challenging opportunity stands out in the wrong direction.
Every practical question is live. When you can start, whether you can work with no onboarding, whether you can talk to a customer unsupervised. At a large employer these are HR’s problem. Here they’re the reader’s problem, this month.
Name the pile
Small-company postings are often badly written and describe about five jobs. That is not sloppiness — it’s an accurate description of the situation. Somebody is doing bookkeeping, supplier chasing, the website, and the phones, and they need to hand over as much of that as one person can carry.
So don’t respond by claiming all five. Respond by saying which part you’d take off them first, and why that one. That sentence is the whole letter, really.
The posting reads like the bookkeeping and the supplier admin have ended up with the same person. If that’s right, I’d expect to take the whole reconciliation and invoicing side off you within a month — that’s what I did at the two practices I’ve worked in, both similar size to yours — and I’d want to leave the supplier relationships with whoever has them now until I understand them.
That paragraph makes a diagnosis, offers something concrete, and shows restraint about the part it doesn’t yet understand. It’s the small-company version of the paragraph that shows judgement, and it’s worth more here than anywhere, because the reader’s actual fear is hiring someone who needs managing.
Signal that you can work without infrastructure
There will be no documentation, no handover, no specialist to escalate to, and no second person who knows how the thing works. Some people find that liberating and some find it unbearable, and the reader has been burned at least once by someone in the second group who didn’t know it about themselves.
Address it with evidence, not assertion. I’m a self-starter is worth nothing. At the last place I was the only person doing the accounts, and I set up the system I inherited nothing of is worth something. If you’ve only worked somewhere large, say what you’ve done that was unsupported — a function you ran alone, a process nobody had documented.
Don’t over-promise. Volunteering to also rebuild their website is not a strength; it reads as someone who will be doing four things badly and resenting it by March.
Length and channel
Shorter than you’d send a large employer. Half a screen on a phone. In the email body — not attached, for the reasons in should the cover letter go in the email body — and with no date-and-address block, which looks faintly absurd landing in a founder’s inbox.
Register: warm and plain. First name if they signed the posting with one. Contractions. No esteemed organisation, no I should like to submit for your consideration. How formal should a cover letter be has the long version; the short one is that formality here reads as distance, and distance is the opposite of what a small team is buying.
A hypothetical letter
Six-person design studio, invented.
Hi Rob,
I saw the production designer role. I’ve been doing packaging and print production at Tallow & Vine for three years — small team, similar setup, so I’ve done the whole span from artwork to press-ready files and dealt with the printers directly.
Reading the posting, my guess is that the artwork-to-print handover is the bit currently eating the senior designers’ time, and that’s the part I’d want. I’m good at the unglamorous half: spec sheets, dielines, catching the mistake at proof rather than after the run. At Tallow I was the only person doing it, so I know how to run it without anyone checking my work.
Two practical things: I’m on a month’s notice, and I’d want to keep doing some of my own illustration work on the side, which I’d rather say now than later.
Portfolio and CV attached. Happy to come in and look at what’s on the go.
Best, Nadia Okonjo
Short, diagnostic, honest about the side work, and it asks for something small. The last line matters — see the closing paragraph and what to ask for — because at this size come in and look at what’s on the go is a realistic next step in a way that discuss how my skills align with your needs never is.
The failure modes
Treating the founder as HR. Please forward my application to the relevant department. There is no relevant department. This is the relevant department.
Asking about the framework. Progression paths, banding, formal review cycles, the L&D budget. Reasonable things to want, and asking in a first letter to a nine-person company tells the reader you’ve mistaken them for a large one. Ask later, when someone can tell you honestly that none of it exists yet.
Telling them how to run the business. A letter that critiques their website, brand and pricing before being hired is not initiative. Diagnosing the job is welcome; diagnosing the owner is not.
Slipping too far the other way. Plain and warm is not the same as careless. hey! saw ur post, sounds cool is a real thing people send.
Offering to work for free. Or for equity only, or on a trial you’ve invented. It devalues you and it makes the reader uncomfortable.
On silence
Small employers go quiet more often than large ones, and it’s usually bandwidth rather than a decision — the person who has to reply is also the person doing payroll this week. Read silence here as much weaker evidence than you would from a company with a recruiter. If you do nudge, keep it to two lines and assume good faith, because in this case good faith is almost always the correct assumption.
The whole thing in one line
Work out what broke, say which part of it you’d take, keep it to half a screen, and write like a person emailing a person.