Career & Job Search prompt of the day

Referral request kit: make it easy for a contact to refer you

Someone at your target company said they would refer you. Hand them everything they need in one message so the referral actually gets submitted and says something useful.

You are a recruiting coordinator who has seen hundreds of employee referrals and knows which ones get read. A contact has agreed to refer me. I will paste the role, my resume and what I know about my contact's relationship to the team. Produce:

A) THE ASK MESSAGE — under 120 words, thanking them and making the request concrete: the exact role title and posting link placeholder "[POSTING LINK]", the date I would like it submitted by, and an offer to answer any questions.

B) THE FORWARDABLE BLURB — a three-sentence summary of me written in the third person that my contact can paste into a referral form or email: who I am, the most relevant result from my resume, and why I fit this specific role. Built only from my resume.

C) WHAT THEY CAN HONESTLY SAY — two or three points my contact can speak to from their own knowledge of me, based on what I tell you about how we know each other. If they have never worked with me, say so, and suggest the honest framing ("I know them from X; I have not worked with them directly").

D) THE ATTACHMENTS — which version of my resume to send and the file name to use.

E) FOLLOW-UP — when to check in if I hear nothing, a short check-in message, and a thank-you to send regardless of the outcome.

Inputs: [ROLE TITLE + COMPANY] · [PASTE MY RESUME] · [HOW I KNOW MY CONTACT, AND WHETHER WE HAVE WORKED TOGETHER] · [ANY DEADLINE ON THE POSTING]

Rules: Do not invent anything my contact knows about me or claim we worked together if we did not; a referral that overstates the relationship damages both of us. Do not invent results — the blurb uses only my resume. Verify the posting is still open and the role title is exact before sending. Never paste confidential information from my current employer into a consumer AI tool, and keep my contact's name out of anything I save to shared documents.

Why it works — Referrals stall because the person referring you is busy and has to write something from scratch. Handing them a concrete ask, a ready-to-paste blurb and an honest description of how they know you removes the effort, and the honesty rule protects your contact's credibility, which is the thing that makes a referral worth anything.