Get a Referral for a Remote Tech Job
You have never shaken a hand at this company, and every guide tells you to network in person. Here is how to build a real internal referral entirely online, without pretending you are close to strangers.
Find my warm intros →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 shared background beats meeting in person
Referrals do not run on friendship. They run on two things: a plausible reason the employee trusts you a little, and how little work you cost them. A former classmate you never met still shares a professor, a campus, and a reputation they do not want to spend. That is enough signal to forward your name.
For remote roles this is an advantage, not a handicap. Distributed teams hire people they have never met by design, so your recruiter already expects to evaluate a stranger. Your job is to give one insider a low-risk reason to vouch, not to fake a bond you do not have.
Where to find people who already share something with you
Stop looking for friends and start looking for overlap. The strongest online-only ties are people who sat where you sat, worked where you worked, or build what you build.
- Same school, any year. Search LinkedIn for the target company filtered by your university. Alumni open messages from other alumni at three to four times the rate of true cold outreach.
- A past employer in common. Someone who also worked at your old company knows exactly what that experience means, so your credibility transfers without a resume.
- The same open-source or community footprint. A shared Discord, a repo you both contributed to, or a niche subreddit gives you a concrete first line that is true and specific.
- Bootcamp and cohort networks. Program alumni Slack channels are full of people now inside companies who remember the shared curriculum you went through.
How FindWarmIntros does the finding for you
The slow part is the search: opening the company page, filtering by your school and past employers, and reading profiles to find who actually overlaps with you. FindWarmIntros does that finding-and-ranking part automatically. You give it a target company, it surfaces the real current employees who share your school or a former job, ranks them by how warm the path is, and drafts an intro that leads with the shared thing instead of the ask.
It is a free tool, and it does not send anything for you or pretend a connection is closer than it is. It just hands you a short, ranked list of honest warm paths so you spend your time writing to the right two people, not scrolling through hundreds of profiles.