Get Referred Into the Team Building Agents
Agentic-automation roles get 400 applicants and hire from inside the graph. If you shared a lab with someone on that team, that is your fastest path, and you are probably not using it.
Find My Lab Contacts →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 a tech target:
Map the lab overlap before you touch the job board
The people most likely to refer you are not your close friends, they are the weak ties from your research past: a labmate two years ahead, a co-author on one paper, someone from the same advisor's group or the same reading seminar. In agentic automation the field is small, so the person building agents at your target company very often trained near you.
Start from the team, not from your contacts. Find who actually ships the agent product (paper authors, conference talks, GitHub commits, their own posts), then trace backward to whether any of them shares a lab, advisor, or program with you. One real overlap beats twenty vague LinkedIn connections.
Reach the shared-lab contact the right way
The goal of the first message is a reply, not a referral. Make the shared thing the subject line and make saying yes cost 30 seconds.
- Lead with the lab, not the ask. Open with the specific overlap ('we both were in Chen's group, you were finishing when I started') so they place you in two seconds instead of wondering who you are.
- Prove you read their work. Name the exact agent project or paper and one concrete thing about it. This separates you from every recruiter and cold applicant in their inbox.
- Ask for the smallest next step. Request a 20 minute call about what the agents team is actually building, or a forward to the hiring manager. Do not attach a resume in message one.
- Give them a one-line forward. Write the two sentences they can paste to their manager, so referring you is copy and paste, not homework.
Let a tool do the graph-tracing for you
Tracing who from your lab now sits near a specific team is slow manual work: cross-referencing labs, papers, and current employers one profile at a time. FindWarmIntros does that finding-and-ranking part for you. You give it your school, past labs or employers, and the target company, and it surfaces the real people there you already share a background with, ranks them by how strong the overlap is, and drafts the intro message you can edit.
It will not get you referred on its own. The judgment about who is actually close to the agents team, and the specific project detail that earns a reply, is still yours. The tool just removes the hours of searching so you spend your energy on the conversation.