How to get a referral at a company
You have the company. What you don't have is the person, and the ask can't be written until you do.
By Jerry Feng, Growth at Happenstance. Updated August 28, 2026.
The short version
When you've picked the company but not the person, this is a search problem before it's a writing problem. Reconstruct everyone you've ever known who works there now, from old mail, calendars and Google Contacts rather than from one social network, because the forgotten names are most of the list. Rank them by how close they sit to the team that owns the role, not by how senior they are. If nobody is inside, find who's one step away and ask them for a name rather than a recommendation.
A large share of the seats you want are filled by somebody who was already known
Companies that hire well end up hiring people their staff already know. The unusual thing is publishing the number. Greenhouse's account of Stripe's hiring describes “40% of their hires coming from employee referrals alone”, on a program with no cash bonus at all (2016). The same piece reports the share sliding as the company grew, from “43.6% in 2014 to 38.9% in 2015 to 36.8% in 2016”.
The pattern holds more widely: at a company people want to work at, a large share of roles go to somebody an employee spoke up for. Being outside that channel costs you more than your resume does.
That changes what the problem is. The wording is the easy half. The hard half is standing in front of a careers page at a company where you think you know nobody. That assumption is usually wrong, and it takes one search to test.
Doing this with Happenstance
Finding the insider is one search, and it is what people approximate with a LinkedIn search, because doing it properly by hand means opening five archives. Happenstance runs that search across all of them at once. It reads seven accounts you connect, Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and holds them as one network. Ask “Who do I know at Datadog?” and the answer names each person, their current title and the account the relationship came from.
When the answer really is nobody, there is a second ring to search. Friends and groups pool networks, with sharing always mutual, so a search runs across the people your friends know as well as the people you know, and the largest groups make 380,000+people searchable. That's the one-step ring turned into a query. Sidedoor starts from the posting instead: paste the job and it searches your network at that company and at similar ones. Happenstance is free. The free plan is the whole product, with usage limits on chat and web searches beyond your network. Pro raises the limits: unlimited web searches and results, higher chat limits, and CSV export. Company by company notes, from Google to Stripe, are under Get a referral. More on a whole search run this way in Happenstance for job seekers, and mutual connections for the people you and an insider share.
Two messages, by which ring the person is in
The first goes to somebody inside who half remembers you. The second goes to somebody outside who knows an insider, and it asks for a name.
Template 1: to somebody inside who barely knows you
Subject: [Loop], [2022], and a role on your billing team
Template 2: to somebody one step away, asking for a name
Subject: Who would you talk to at [Datadog]?
Once you have a name and they have said yes, the mechanics of what to hand them are on how to ask for a referral for a job. If the name that comes back is somebody from a job you left a long time ago, asking someone to refer you deals with the reopening, and asking for a job referral on LinkedIn has the version constrained to that platform's message limits.
What Happenstance can see
Email is read as headers only. Message content and attachments never reach our servers. Yes. Your connections are searchable only by you, the friends you accept, and the groups you join, and sharing is always mutual. Your public profile shows a constellation of named people you know by default, which you can turn off anytime. We never share, sell, or use your data to train AI models. Happenstance is SOC 2 certified and DTI Trust Level 2; the full list of what is stored and for how long is on the security page.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get a referral at a company where I know nobody?
Check that premise before you accept it. Most people know somebody at a large employer and have forgotten, because the relationship lives in an old mail archive or a calendar from a previous job rather than in memory. If the search does come back empty, the next move is one step out: find the people you know who know somebody there, and ask them for a name rather than a recommendation.
Can a recruiter refer me?
A recruiter can move your application along, which is worth having, but it isn't the same thing. Internal referral programs usually require an employee to file a form saying how they know you and how strongly they recommend you, and a recruiter who has never met you can't answer either field honestly. Treat a friendly recruiter as a source of information about the role and keep looking for a referrer.
Does a referral from a different department count?
It counts, and it counts less. What matters is whether the person can answer the form's two hardest questions, how they came to know you and how much they would stake on you, so a colleague from a different function who worked with you elsewhere is a good referrer. Somebody in a different function who has never worked with you can answer neither, and hiring managers can tell the difference at a glance.
Do former employees count for a referral?
Not for the internal form, which almost always requires a current employee. Former employees are still useful in a different way: they know who runs the team, how the interview loop works, whether the requisition is open, and often which current employee to talk to. That last one is the reason to write to them.
How many people at one company should I approach?
One at a time, and never two on the same day. Referral systems flag duplicate submissions, recruiters mention them to each other, and both referrers work out what happened. Ask the strongest path, give it a week, and move to the next name only once the first has resolved.
Is it worth messaging employees I have never met?
For a referral, rarely. For information, often. A stranger cannot responsibly vouch for you, so asking them to puts them in an awkward position and usually gets no reply. The same message asking one specific question, such as who owns the team or whether the role is already promised internally, gets answered surprisingly often.
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