How to ask for a referral, and who to ask

A referral is asking someone inside a company to pass your application on. It doesn't skip interviews or guarantee a reply — it changes the channel your resume arrives through, from an online form to a person. Ask an employee on the team, not the recruiter, and include three things: which job, why you fit, and one clear request.

This is the post we owed you. In the post about tailoring your resume we wrote "find one person who could put you forward" and moved on, as though that were the easy part. It isn't.

What a referral is, and what it isn't

A referral — "חבר מביא חבר" in Hebrew, literally "a friend brings a friend" — is an employee passing your application to the recruiter or hiring manager with their name attached to it.

What it is not:

It doesn't skip the interviews. Same rounds as everyone else. If you're not right for the job, you won't get it.
It doesn't require a close friendship. Someone from your degree, your unit, a previous company — that's enough. Sometimes someone who doesn't know you at all.
It isn't purely a favour you owe them for. Most Israeli tech companies pay a bonus to an employee whose referral gets hired. You're not only asking for help; you're handing them a shot at that bonus.

What it is: a change of channel. Instead of joining a queue of hundreds inside a form, your file reaches the recruiter from a person they work with. That doesn't guarantee a call. It does guarantee somebody reads it.

Who to ask, and who not to

This is where most people get it wrong, and the cost of getting it wrong is that the message goes nowhere.

Who	Why them	Odds of a reply
Someone on the team you're applying to	They want a good colleague and they know the role from the inside. They're also the only person who can tell the recruiter "I spoke to him, he fits"	Highest
Anyone you already know who works there	A small social debt already exists. No need to explain who you are	High
An employee there in an unrelated role	Can still refer you, and the bonus applies to them too	Medium
The hiring manager	Not a referral — a direct approach. Legitimate, but they're already flooded	Medium-low
The recruiter	They receive referrals; they don't give them. Messaging them is the same application you were trying to avoid	Low
The CEO or a VP	Won't know the role or its requirements, and will likely forward it on with no context	Low

The short version: one employee on the right team beats five random people at the company.

What to write to someone who doesn't know you

Short enough to read on a phone without scrolling. Four parts, in this order:

Who you are, in one line. Role and experience, not a biography.
Which job. With a link. Not "I saw you have openings".
Why you fit, with two pieces of evidence. Not credentials — things you did that the job asks for.
One clear request. Not "I'd love to hear from you". "Could you pass my resume inside?"

What not to include: an attachment in the first message (ask first), a sentence about how excited you are by the company, and a second request tacked onto the first. Every extra ask lowers the odds the first one gets answered.

A message you can copy

Hi Dana — I'm Yuval, a backend engineer with four years in Python.

I saw the Backend Engineer opening on the infrastructure team — [link].

Over the last two years I built the API layer serving roughly 2,000 requests a second, and led a five-person team's move to microservices.

Could you pass my resume inside? Happy to send it over if that works for you.

Four lines. If it feels too short, that's the point.

What to do when you know nobody there

This is most people's situation, and most guides skip it.

First, check whether it's true. LinkedIn shows you, on a company's page and on a job posting, which of your connections work there. Most people have more than they remember — someone from a degree, a previous employer, a course. Look before you assume.

Then, second-degree connections. If a friend of yours knows someone there, your request is to the friend, and it isn't for a referral — it's for an introduction. "Could you connect me with X?" is a much smaller ask, and it lands better.

Only then, a cold message. Approaching an employee who doesn't know you does work sometimes. Two changes: open with something concrete you actually share (the same unit, the same degree, the same stack), and downgrade the ask — instead of "could you pass my resume inside", try "is this worth applying to, in your view?". That question is easy to answer, and once it's answered the conversation is open.

Does a referral actually help, and what does the research show

Careful here, because this is exactly where everyone reaches for a statistic.

What has actually been measured, in work you can go and read:

A 2015 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, using personnel data from nine large firms, found that referred applicants are more likely to be hired and more likely to accept an offer — even when their skills look similar to everyone else's. They also quit less and earn slightly more.
A 2024 study in Labour Economics found that employers apply less formal screening to referred candidates.
A 2019 review in the Journal of Applied Psychology collects what the field has found over the past few decades.

Note what those papers do not say. None of them says a referral will get you an interview. They say this channel behaves differently from the form, and that the difference has been measured more than once.

About that 30-40% figure

You'll see it everywhere: "30-40% of tech hires come from referrals". Geektime published it in 2024 (checked 2 September 2026), and others quote similar numbers.

We couldn't find a source for it in the Israeli market — no measurement, no survey, no official figure. The order of magnitude may well be right; we simply have no way to know. So we won't quote it as fact, and if someone waves it at you, ask where it came from. That's the same rule we applied to the claim that 75% of resumes are auto-rejected, and that one suits us even less.

What's already been written about this

The best Hebrew page on the subject is Geektime's, from 29 February 2024 (checked 2 September 2026).

What it does better than this post: it's written mostly from the referrer's side — the employee deciding who to put forward. If you want to understand what's going through the head of the person you're about to message, and why they might hesitate, that's the page. We wrote the other half of the same conversation.

TechJob and other Israeli recruitment sites explain the mechanism, but they write it as an employer's product — why a company should run a referral scheme. Accurate, just not addressed to you. (Both checked 2 September 2026.)

You asked and got nothing back

One reminder, after five to seven days, in two lines: name the job again and ask whether it works for them. If that gets nothing either, it's over, and you move to the next person at that company.

Worth doing meanwhile: apply through the form in parallel. A referral and an ordinary application don't cancel each other out, and a good job closes while you're waiting on someone who may not have seen the message.

Why this doesn't happen in practice

The three steps — identify the right person, write them a message specific to this job, follow it up — take twenty to thirty minutes per role. Across ten roles a week that's a whole evening, every week, while you probably also have a job.

That's the part we built Tagishoti for: it finds who at the company could put you forward and drafts a message to them. Three caveats that belong right here: finding those people requires a connected LinkedIn account, nothing is sent until you approve it, and nobody can promise the person who receives it will agree to refer you. The comparison with the other tools in this market, including what each one does better, is in the tools map.