The LinkedIn Trojan Horse
The LinkedIn Trojan Horse is a strategy we developed during our sophomore year (and utilized every recruiting season after that) to get interviews at exciting companies when our applications through those companies’ websites were being ignored (we submitted hundreds of applications)
Prep
BEFORE you follow the strategy laid out in this guide you need some LinkedIn Profile Fundamentals
Get a good profile picture. A selfie won’t cut it. Make sure it is clear and has a background that is not distracting
Your school and major must be added
Add a couple of companies of interest (what are some dream jobs and companies, add those!!)
Add an About section. Something like: “I am a [grade] [major] student at the [university] who is passionate about [technical thing], [technical thing], [fun thing], and [volunteer thing].” Be creative and honest, it only benefits you. If there is one job profile it is worth putting some effort into, this is it.
First, some background.
Most established companies have a very traditional hiring process. Their recruiters reach out to students through career fairs, events, and emails (and sometimes they won’t reach out to you at all . . . Tesla). Then the application opens and students have a couple of months to submit their resume and demographic info into a black hole. Once the deadline is up, recruiters are inundated with thousands of resumes. They often first hire from referrals and then sift through the huge pile of resumes to fill the extra positions. How do they choose the right candidate? It's like college applications, no one really knows. Is it GPA? Demonstrated leadership roles? Top tier clubs? A passionate cover letter? There are thousands of hits on Google about how to create the perfect resume, none work 100% (or even 50%) of the time. Over my collegiate career, I have filled out hundreds of these applications. I have gotten single-digit interviews as a result.
So . . . how do YOU CONTROL YOUR OWN DESTINY when your resume is sitting in a pile on a desk or in a Dropbox folder on some server. You need to be proactive.
Recruiters are overworked and the internal systems they work within are very bureaucratic. Messaging a recruiter on LinkedIn is generally unlikely to succeed.
The LinkedIn Trojan Horse of job recruiting strategy is to message actual engineers. You can enter enemy lines (or hopefully one-day friendly lines) without having to cross the moat of anonymous job applications, and scale the wall of recruiters. You enter through the front gates as a solution for overworked full-time engineers, everyone wins.
I am going to describe the strategy for the use case of getting an internship at a startup and then provide slight modifications for bigger companies.
Startups:
If you have read our 4 Year Plan, and found companies with our guide How To Find Startups, you already have a list of 10-15 startups you are interested in. If not, check out those pages first before implementing The LinkedIn Trojan Horse.
Startups are small and desperate to recruit, often times though recruiting is done by a cofounder or a sales/business guy. They can’t allocate the resources of a full-time recruiter and are usually purely looking for full-time hires in a couple of specific roles, leveraging their internal networks. You are the perfect asset for them, inexpensive and effective, but they won’t reach out to you. You can try to send a message to the email on their website, or apply for a full-time role and say you are a student (I have tried this many times) but oftentimes there are a million things going on and they will miss it.
Instead, you need to go to the source, find the person(s) who is working 60+ hour weeks doing the type of job you would like to do (in this example, mechanical engineering design), and let them know you are excited about what they are doing and would love to help them out this summer.
They will be overjoyed. Odds are, they have way too many CAD models to develop, engineering drawings to draft, and parts to source, and would love to be able to offload some of the work to you. Remember, you are a CAD wizard (or need to be by the time you get there) and odds are high you can probably hold your own at email and spreadsheets!!!
Cast a wide net, if a company has 4 mechanical engineers, a CAD engineer, and an engineering manager, message all of them.
Here Are The Steps:
Find them on LinkedIn. I like to do this by finding the company and then looking at people who work there.
Find the people who have roles similar to what you want to do.
Connect with them and click add a note. You get 300 characters.
1.
2.
3.
I send something like:
“Hi [name], I'm very interested in interning on your team this summer at [name]! This past year, [talk about past internship or project] & [add second project or internship]. I would love to share my resume/portfolio & set up a call. Thanks!”
If you really want to work there, maybe craft something more specific. I tend to keep it relatively generic because I will contact 10-15 companies and don’t have time to write that many custom messages. If you have time, do it! It is ok to contact multiple people at the same company. It is not weird. They will see it as interest and excitement! Repeat for each company on your list
Follow-Ups:
You need to keep LinkedIn open on your computer and have notifications set up for your phone. Especially in the 4-5 hours after you send the messages. THIS IS KEY.
People check LinkedIn because they get an email with your message request, not because they are always on LinkedIn (remember they are busy grinding at a startup). So when they respond to you, you need to respond right back and keep them engaged. Don’t stop messaging back and forth until you get what you want (a request to send them your resume, an interview, a forward to another colleague, or a rejection). If you aren’t getting any responses from people at a company you can retract your connection requests and try on a weekend. People have their LinkedIn connected to their personal email and may check more regularly on the weekends.
Remember it is a numbers game. You are messaging people at 10-15 companies in hopes of getting good leads at 3 or 4. Don’t be discouraged by a couple of companies saying they aren’t taking interns or not responding. You may run out of connection requests and need LinkedIn Premium. You can get one month for free if you add a credit card. Just remember to cancel after one month. The one-month promotion renews annually so don’t worry about using it up. It will be around next time you need to recruit!
Larger Company Modifications:
When I say larger companies, I’m talking companies with 30+ mechanical engineers. This most likely means the whole company has at least 500 people. These have to be tech companies that are rapidly growing (Tesla, SpaceX, Rivian, Relativity, to name a few). I don’t think this strategy will work as well for a GM or P&G, but I have never tried so I can’t tell you for sure.
I separate these larger companies from startups because they will have job applications on their website, recruiters dedicated to finding college students, and probably some degree of an internship program. It is unlikely that you will message an engineer who will then turn to his boss sitting next to him and say “hey this college kid messaged me let’s hire him,” and then they will set up an interview in a matter of minutes. There will be more of a process. You will message engineers, they will send your resume to their manager, and if they approve, they will send it over to the recruiter who will link it to the application you already submitted. Then you might get an interview. This is important to understand because it requires more internal steps to happen and there is a greater chance of your application/message/referral getting caught up in the bureaucracy. For this reason, the volume of messages really matters.
Another key to the success of this strategy is that inside larger companies, there is a disconnect between recruiters and overworked engineers who could really use some extra help from an intern. Those engineers are so overworked they don’t have time to ask for help. And if they do, their managers don’t want to deal with recruiters, massive folders of resumes, and the bureaucracy of scheduling lots of interviews. Everyone needs a quick solution. You show initiative by reaching out (already a good impression) and they can quickly figure out if you are a good fit. Plus, you would much rather be hired as a “low-cost engineering solution” than a college student to fill an internship program slot. You will get impactful work and lots of autonomy.
This strategy works!!
Sophomore Co-Op Case Study:
I really wanted to work at Tesla during the spring and summer of 2021. I had worked at a startup for a long time and wanted to see what it was like to work at — in my opinion, the most innovative company in the world. I was also intrigued to see what a fast-paced work culture would be like at a larger company. I filled out every application, got student referrals, and messaged recruiters on LinkedIn. None of these strategies worked. It was late October and the clock was ticking, so I decided to LinkedIn message a couple of engineers in roles I thought would be interesting. Then I messaged a few more. 10 pages of engineers and 98 connection requests later I have some statistics for you.
30 people either looked at my profile or messaged me. I call this an engagement
15 of those 30 asked me to send them my resume through LinkedIn or email
3 sets of interviews with different teams were scheduled
