How to Get Referred When Moving to a New City
Relocating feels like you are starting your network from zero, but you are not. The honest promise: the people who can refer you already exist, and most of them share a school or a former employer with you.
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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.
See who can refer you in - pick your target company:
Why relocation is a referral problem, not a distance problem
Most people relocating assume they need to build a local network before they can get hired. That is backwards. You do not need people who live in the new city. You need people who work at the companies you are targeting, and those people can live anywhere and still refer you into a local role.
The real barrier is that you are applying cold to jobs in a place where no one can vouch for you. A referral fixes that instantly, and referrals do not require geography. They require a shared thread: a school, a past job, a mutual manager. Start there and the distance stops mattering.
How to turn a move into warm introductions
Relocation actually gives you a reason to reach out that cold applicants do not have. Use it. Here is the sequence that works.
- Make a target list of companies, not jobs. Pick 10 to 15 employers in your new city. You are looking for people to connect with there, not open reqs, so a company without a posting today still counts.
- Find who you already share something with. Look for alumni from your school and people from your old employers who now work at those companies. A shared line on your resume is the warmest opener you have.
- Lead with the shared thread and the move. Open with what you have in common, then say you are relocating to their city and would value 15 minutes on what it is like there. This is a low cost yes, not a favor.
- Let the referral be their idea. Do not ask to be referred in the first message. Once someone has talked to you and knows you are legitimate, offering to refer you costs them almost nothing, and most people will.
Finding the right people without hours of digging
The hard part is not the outreach. It is figuring out which of the hundreds of people at a target company actually share a school or a former employer with you, and which of those are worth contacting first. Doing that by hand across 15 companies is a weekend of LinkedIn scrolling.
This is the finding-and-ranking part that FindWarmIntros does for you. You give it a target company, 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 do the human part, the conversation, but you skip the search.