Alumni Networking

How to Find Alumni From Your School at a Company

LinkedIn buried the alumni tool, so most people give up after two dead-end searches. There is still a reliable way to get a list of real names who share your school and work where you want to work.

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Example - what you’ll see
in
Someone who works at your target company
🎓 Same university as you  ·  💼 Shared past employer
🔥 Strongest
in
A recruiter at your target company
🎓 Same university as you
🎓 Alumni

✍️ 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:

Short answer: Go to your school's LinkedIn university page and click Alumni, then filter by 'Where they work' for the company and 'Where they live' for the city. If that view is thin, run a People search for the company and set the School filter to your school, which catches alumni who never linked their profile to the university page. Cross-check with your school's own alumni directory and any regional alumni club, since those list people whose LinkedIn is stale. Aim for 8 to 12 names, then rank them by how close their team is to the job you want.

Where alumni actually hide (three different lists, not one)

Most people search one place, find two names, and conclude their school has no presence at the company. The truth is that alumni are scattered across three separate indexes that do not talk to each other, and each one misses people the others catch.

The LinkedIn university page Alumni tab only includes people who selected your school from the official dropdown when they filled out their education. Anyone who typed the school name freehand, listed only an abbreviation, or attended before the page existed is invisible there. That is a large fraction of anyone who graduated more than a decade ago, which is exactly the seniority you want.

The search moves that surface names the alumni tab misses

Each of these pulls from a different index, so run all of them rather than picking your favorite. Ten minutes of this beats an hour of scrolling one page.

  • People search, School filter. Search the company name under People, then apply the School filter on the left rather than starting from the university page. This reads the education field directly and catches freehand entries the university page drops.
  • Every name your school goes by. Run the search once per variant: full name, common abbreviation, the old name if it was renamed, and the specific college or program inside the university. Someone who wrote 'Wharton' will not appear in a search for 'University of Pennsylvania'.
  • Your school's own directory and regional clubs. Alumni associations keep employer and city fields that people update for reunions but never update on LinkedIn. Regional clubs (the Chicago chapter, the Bay Area chapter) are how you build a city list rather than a company list.
  • Google site search as a backstop. Search site:linkedin.com/in plus the company name plus your school name in quotes. Google indexed profiles that LinkedIn's own filters will not show you when you are outside someone's network.

Turning a list of names into one person worth writing

A list of 40 alumni is not progress. The point of the search is to find the two or three people who can actually say something about the role you want, and the sorting rule is simple: proximity to the work beats seniority, and recent overlap beats a shared decade. Someone who joined the team you are targeting eighteen months ago will answer. The VP who graduated the year you were born will not.

Rank each name on three things: does their current team touch the job you want, did your time at the school overlap or nearly overlap with theirs, and is there a second thing you share (a past employer, a city, a professor, a club). Two shared things is roughly the threshold where a stranger writes back, because it stops reading like a scrape and starts reading like a real connection.

This ranking step is the part people skip, and it is the part FindWarmIntros automates. It searches the public web for people at your target company who share your school or a past employer, ranks them by how strong the overlap is, and drafts the intro message around the specific thing you share. It is free, and it exists because doing this by hand takes an hour per company and most people quit at minute twelve.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does LinkedIn show me so few alumni at the company?
Two reasons. The Alumni tab only counts people who picked your school from the official dropdown, and LinkedIn hides third-degree profiles from free accounts. Run a People search with the School filter instead, try every variant of the school name, and back it up with a Google site:linkedin.com/in search, which is not gated by your network distance.
Should I search by company or by city first?
Company first if you have a specific target, because the list is short enough to actually work through. City first if you are relocating or exploring, since regional alumni clubs are organized around geography and will give you people across many employers. City lists are better for finding out what is hiring; company lists are better for getting into one job.
How many alumni do I need to find before I start reaching out?
Around 8 to 12 at a given company, which usually yields two or three worth writing. Fewer than that and you have no basis for ranking, so you end up messaging whoever came up first, which is generally the most senior and least responsive person on the list.
What if literally nobody from my school works there?
Then the shared thing is not your school. Search your past employers against the company instead, which is often a stronger signal anyway because you can talk about actual work. A former colleague two jobs back at your target company beats an alum you never met, every time.

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