In high school, I read my first book: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
Early on, I learned the immense value of building a strong network especially from scratch, with complete strangers.
This also went hand in hand with realizing that having a referral (at least in the tech industry) greatly increases the chances of your application being considered, since it literally lands right in a recruiter’s lap.
I’m now 21, and over the past four years, I feel like I’ve built a pretty strong network especially for someone who started with zero connections.
Not only am I “connected” with some fascinating people, but I’ve also built genuine friendships with them.
So, in this short post, I’ll be sharing a few thoughts on how you can get your foot in the door.
If you’re young, ambitious, and somewhat outgoing, I hope this will be valuable to you. I definitely wish I had read something like this a few years ago.
This isn’t some magical “hack” or manipulation tactic, I’m just someone who’s learned how to connect with people from all walks of life.
In this post:
- Find people similar to you
- Be curious
- Being young lets you off the hook
1. Find people similar to you
My parents are Turkish, and I’ve always been aware of how talented and diverse we are when it comes to producing engineering talent.
Naturally, I initially reached out to other Turks, since they were often more willing to help out one of their own.
If you’re not part of a tight knit culture, that’s totally fine, it just means you’ll have fewer obvious things to connect on, but it’s not a disadvantage.
2. Be curious
One mistake many people make is sending a generic message like:
“Hey, how’s it going? I graduated from X and I’m applying for Y — could you give me a referral?”
You might think that sounds uninspired and you’d be right but you’d be surprised how many messages like that people actually receive.
Remember: you don’t know this person. Show them why they should care about you and your story.
What I did was reach out to people whose background genuinely intrigued me maybe they built a cool project, had an interesting career path, or worked at a company I admired.
There are countless details you can pick up on their website, résumé, LinkedIn profile and use as a natural entry point to start a real conversation.
Keep in mind: most people get dozens of cold messages asking for referrals. Don’t be one more line in their inbox that sounds like everyone else.
3. Being young lets you off the hook
Now, I don’t mean this as an excuse to do dumb stuff and say “it’s fine, I’m young.”
But being young does give you room to take chances and make mistakes and people are usually more forgiving about it.
Honestly, if you’re in your early 20s, you have nothing to lose by reaching out to strangers. In fact, it’s the best time to do it.
I’ve asked some pretty naive questions in the past, but people often found it endearing partly because of my age and curiosity.
One thing I noticed: reaching out to people 30+ can be surprisingly effective.
Once they reach a senior level, many feel it’s time to “pay it forward” to the next generation.