Turn Your MBWay Lyon Network Into a Warm Intro Abroad
You have a French business degree and a target company in London, Berlin, or New York, but no obvious way in. The honest fix is not more cold applications, it is finding the one alumnus already inside who will forward your name.
Find your warm intros →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
A plain LinkedIn search buries the people who would actually help you.
It ranks by prominence, so the most-followed, most-messaged names sit on top. FindWarmIntros surfaces the coworkers who share your school or a past employer - the people most likely to reply - and hands you a ready-to-send intro.
✍️ 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 the French network travels better than you think
French business school ties are unusually portable. The promo system (your graduating class), the BDE and alumni associations, and the reflex to answer a fellow diplome mean a Lyon graduate now in London or Singapore will often reply to someone from the same program, even years later.
The mistake is treating the network as a list of names. It is a set of shared references: the same campus on Rue de Marseille, the same professors, the same city. Naming one of those in the first line is what turns a stranger into a contact who reads your message.
How to activate it, step by step
Work in this order. Each step makes the next one cost the other person less effort.
- Map who is already abroad. Search LinkedIn for your program plus the target city or company. Filter to people who share your promo year, an association, or a former employer, because those give you a real opening line.
- Lead with the shared thing, not the ask. Open in French with the connection ('diplome MBWay Lyon comme toi, promo 2021') before anything else. The shared campus earns the reply that a cold pitch never will.
- Ask for 15 minutes, not a referral. Request advice on breaking into their market. People who would never risk a referral for a stranger will happily explain how they landed abroad, and that conversation is where the intro is born.
- Make the forward a 30-second job. Once they offer to help, hand them a two-line blurb and the exact role link so they can pass it on without writing anything themselves.
Where FindWarmIntros fits
The slow part is the mapping: scrolling LinkedIn to find which of the hundreds of MBWay Lyon or grande ecole alumni actually sit inside your target company, and which shared thread (promo, association, past employer) gives you an honest opening.
FindWarmIntros does that finding-and-ranking part for you. You give it a target company, it surfaces the real people there you share a school or past employer with, ranks them by how strong the connection is, and drafts an intro message you can edit. It is free, and it leaves the human part, the actual conversation, to you.