What's on my mind?
A lady said something that stuck with me.
She said she'd stopped applying to the "big ones". Not because she wasn't qualified. Because she'd convinced herself that those roles go to people who know people, and she knows nobody.
I understand it. But she's solving the wrong problem.
Here's the thing about a referral. A referral does not get you the job. It has never gotten anyone the job. What a referral actually does is much smaller and much more boring than that: it gets you seen.
That's it. It moves your name from a pile of four thousand to a pile of nine. Everything after that is still on you.
So the real bottleneck was never merit. It was attention. And once you see it that way, the question changes from "who do I know?" to "how do I buy attention without an insider?"
Three ways I'd do it.
Let your work do the referring. A person vouching for you is one signal. Something you built, wrote or shipped that they can see with their own eyes is a stronger one, because it doesn't require them to trust a stranger's opinion. Write the case study. Publish the analysis. Put it where it can be found.
Warm the room before you knock. Show up at their webinars. Ask a real question. Comment on what their people publish — not "great post", but the kind of thing that makes someone check who you are. Do that for six weeks and your name is no longer cold when it lands.
Apply first. Then find your human. Most people do this backwards and spend three months hunting for an introduction they never get. Send the application. Then send one short, specific note to one person on that team. Not asking for a favour. Just telling them you applied and why you care.
None of this is as fast as being someone's cousin. I know.
But the people you're comparing yourself to might not be smarter than you. They were just visible earlier.
You can't always get someone to open the door for you. What you can do is make sure that when you knock, they already know your name.
Best known sometimes sells better than the best.
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