Turn Labmates Into Warm Intros at Top Companies
You spent years next to people who now work at Nvidia, Stripe and Google, and you are cold-applying anyway. Your cohort is the warmest path you have, and most of them are glad to help.
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:
Your Lab and Cohort Are Your Warmest Network
For a recent MS or PhD, the people who sat two desks over are now scattered across exactly the companies you are targeting. Someone from your lab defended a year early and joined Nvidia. A peer from your first-year seminar is now a data scientist at Stripe. Those are not strangers, they are people who watched you work.
That firsthand knowledge is the whole point. A referral from a former labmate carries weight because they can say they watched you debug a cluster at 2am or co-authored a paper with you. A recruiter reading a cold application gets none of that signal, which is why warm paths convert far better than the apply button.
How to Message a Former Labmate
The mistake is opening with the ask. Open with the shared thing, make helping you cost about 30 seconds, and let them say yes without writing an essay.
- Name the exact overlap. Not just the school. Say the lab, the advisor, the course, or the conference you both attended, so they place you in two seconds instead of squinting at your name.
- Say what you are targeting, specifically. Name the team or role, not just the company. It is far easier to forward one precise request than to guess where you might fit.
- Make the yes tiny. Ask for a 15-minute call or a referral link, not a career favor. Offer a short blurb they can paste, so helping you is copy and paste, not homework.
- Reach out before you apply. A referral submitted alongside your application counts. One sent after you are already in the system usually does not, so message them first.
Find Who From Your Program Is Already Inside
The hard part is usually not the message, it is knowing who to send it to. LinkedIn will not tell you which of the 400 people from your department landed at your five target companies, and cross-referencing alumni lists by hand takes hours.
This is the finding-and-ranking step FindWarmIntros handles: you give it a target company plus your school or past lab, and it surfaces the real people you share a background with and drafts the intro, ranked by how strong the overlap is. You still write the human part, you just skip the hours of digging to learn who is even reachable.
What to Ask For, and When
Match the ask to how well you knew them. A close collaborator can give a direct referral and a manager introduction. Someone you only shared a seminar with is better asked for a 15-minute call about the team, which often turns into a referral once they remember your work.
Time it around their hiring, not your anxiety. Reach out when a role is freshly posted, follow up once after four or five business days, and always tell them the exact req you are applying to so their referral lands on the right desk.