Historically, I’ve had very low response rates when applying cold — but much better results when I got a referral. So I thought to myself — what if I gave my Linkedin credentials to a virtual assistant from the Philippines, and asked them to reach out to referrals on my behalf?
Being an engineer, I ended up building a small UI to help the VA track jobs, message people, and submit applications. Surprisingly, it worked really well!
In the last 3 weeks my VA has gotten me 50+ referrals, and applied to to > 100 jobs on my behalf. And from those I’ve gotten 15 interviews (most jobs in the $170K - 200K range). If anyone’s curious, here’s the most common referral script she used when reaching out to people on Linkedin.
Hey [name],
I noticed [company] is hiring for a few interesting software engineering roles so I wanted to reach out.
I was wondering — what do you think would be the best way to apply?
Does [company] happen to have a referral system or is it best to just apply online?
Thanks!
The most surprising thing I learned is how open people are to referring someone they’ve never worked with (since most companies offer referral bonuses). I also think that Linkedin has some sort of Elo score based on how active your profile is, because once I started doing this I also started to get way more inbound from recruiters — but that's just speculation .
Anyways, I shared these results with some of my friends and they asked me to make it into a product that they could use — so that’s what I did. I'm still signing up our first few users, but I've put together a brief demo video at getsourcify.xyz if people are interested!
I’m still starting out, and it takes a while to vet and hire good virtual assistants, so we have limited capacity for now. But if you’re interested, please reach out
I'm happy to answer any questions about the service, my job hunt process, or how you can replicate this on your own :)