Reconnect With a Former Colleague for a Referral
You worked side by side for two years, then lost touch, and now they are at the exact company you want. Here is how to reconnect without sounding like you only showed up because you need something.
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✍️ 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.
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Why a former colleague is your strongest referral path
A former colleague has already seen you work. Unlike a school connection or a stranger on LinkedIn, they can vouch for how you actually operate under deadline, which is exactly what a referral is worth to a hiring manager. That firsthand credibility is why an internal referral from someone who worked with you beats a cold application by a wide margin.
The catch is timing. If your first message in three years is a favor request, it reads as transactional. The fix is not to hide the ask forever, it is to open with the shared history that makes the ask feel natural, then get to the point quickly.
The four-step reconnect sequence
Do not compress this into one message. Splitting the reconnect from the ask gives your colleague a graceful moment to respond and signals you are not treating them purely as a means to a job.
- Open with a specific memory. Name the actual project, the launch you shipped together, or the manager you both survived. Specificity proves you remember them as a person, not as a badge at your target company.
- Ask about them first. A genuine question ('how are you finding the switch to the platform team?') invites a reply and reopens the relationship before any request exists.
- Surface your interest lightly. Once they reply, mention you have been looking at roles on their team and ask if they would be open to sharing what it is really like there. This is a soft ask, not a referral request yet.
- Make the referral a 30-second task. Send the exact job link, two lines on why you fit, and an explicit out: 'no pressure at all if it is not a fit for you to pass along.'
Finding who you actually overlapped with (and where they landed)
The hard part is often just remembering who from your past is now inside your target company. People change jobs quietly, and the coworker you need may have moved twice since you last spoke. This is the finding-and-ranking step that FindWarmIntros handles for you: it scans your shared employers and schools against a target company, surfaces the real people you overlapped with, ranks them by how strong the connection is, and drafts an intro message you can edit. You still write the human parts, but you skip the hour of detective work.
Whether you use a tool or your own memory, the principle holds. Reach for the person with the most concrete shared history first, because their referral carries the most weight and their reply is the most likely.