How to Use Referrals to Actually Get Jobs - The Three Types of Referrals

Referrals are the best way to get interviews. But most people are focusing only on one type of referral: the worst type. Here's how to use referrals to actually get interviews.

All things considered, Referrals are the best way into most companies.

I’m not exaggerating. Here’s why.

They’re both low effort and high impact:

Let me break this down:

Low Effort, Low Impact - Applying via Job Board

We all know this by now: just dropping your generic resume via the LinkedIn or <insert most popular job board in your country> isn’t going to cut it.

There was an era where it used to work. I’ve used it myself.

But that era is long gone.

High Effort, Low Impact - Cover Letter (or Similar Tactics)

The inclination is to want to use the same mechanism - dropping your resume - but adding more work.

Most of you try a cover letter. Here’s the sad truth from a survey of hiring managers I did last June: 90%+ of the time, your cover letter isn’t even read.

Some of you try other tactics like customizing your resume or sending a ping to the hiring manager on LinkedIn. While better then cover letters, these also aren’t always read.

See, the challenge is: actually getting reviewed.

Low Effort, High Impact - Referral

That’s where referrals come in.

In most cases, we’re talking about a few messages and a few of meetings. It’s not actually that hard to get a referral from someone to a new job.

And referrals tend to solve a key problem for you: your application actually gets reviewed.

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention a tactic that also has high impact…

High Effort, High Impact - Work Product

There are other advanced techniques to getting a job, of course. And I’ve talked about many of them in my newsletter.

They tend to be more work than referrals, but they can also be even higher impact. The work product is the most prominent example of this.

But, putting it all together, referrals are often your highest “bang for your buck” tactic to getting a job.

You would think this is all straightforward…

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But they’re not working for everyone

Ideally the result of using referrals is beauty.

To illustrate, I asked 3 mentees who recently got jobs to share all their application to interview data:

For them, referrals worked incredibly well - better than customized resumes and cover letters, but not as good as work products.

But referrals are not working for everyone!

I recently spoke at Duke University’s MBA Tech Club. Here’s what I heard from the students:

I’m using referrals and still getting no interviews.

I have used referral for every job application and still no interviews. We’re using all the techniques… I don’t know what to do.

Student after student wasn’t seeing those 25% interview rates. I had another person message me yesterday:

Despite after getting a referral, I haven’t had a single interview.

So what’s going on here?

That’s the subject of today’s deep dive.

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Today’s Deep Dive

I’m going to give you the guide I wish I had when I was using referrals to try to get a job:

1. The Three Types of Referrals

2. How to Get The Right Types of Referrals

3. How to Stack Referrals

4. Time Management