Get a Big Four Referral Through a Shared Alum
The Big Four hire thousands a year, yet your resume still dies in an applicant pool of ten thousand. A single referral from someone who went to your school moves you from the pile to a recruiter's inbox.
Find My Big Four Contact →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick your target company:
Why a referral beats the Big Four application portal
Each Big Four firm receives hundreds of thousands of applications a year and routes them through automated screening before a human sees them. A cold application competes with everyone. A referral does not sit in that queue.
Inside all four firms, employees are paid a bonus (often several thousand dollars) when a referral they submitted gets hired. That means the person you ask has a real financial reason to help you, as long as you make it easy for them to say yes. Your job is to remove the friction, not to plead.
How to find and ask a shared-alumni contact
The strongest referrer is not the most senior person you can find. It is the person you actually share something with, because shared background is what makes them vouch for you honestly.
- Search by overlap, not title. Look for people at the target firm who went to your college, worked at a company you worked at, or belong to your accounting fraternity like Beta Alpha Psi. Shared context is the whole reason a stranger replies.
- Name the exact practice and req. Do not say you are open to anything. Say you are applying to the PwC Assurance associate role in Chicago, req number included. Referral portals ask for a specific opening, so vague asks stall.
- Make helping cost 30 seconds. Send your one-line pitch, the req link, and your resume in the first message so they can paste it straight into the internal tool without a back-and-forth.
- Lead with the share, not the ask. Open with the thing you have in common (same program, same old firm) before you mention the referral, so it reads as a peer reaching out, not a favor request from a stranger.
Skip the manual hunt for who to ask
The hard part is not writing the message. It is finding which of the tens of thousands of people at Deloitte or EY actually shares your school or a past employer, and which of them sits near the practice you want. Doing that by hand across four firms takes hours of profile-scrolling.
FindWarmIntros does that finding-and-ranking step for you: point it at KPMG, Deloitte, EY, or PwC, and it surfaces the real people there who overlap with your background, ranks them by how warm the connection is, and drafts an intro that leads with what you share. You still send it yourself, in your own words.