"I've forwarded your CV and cover letter to the hiring manager."
That reply came from someone I had cold-messaged on LinkedIn a few weeks earlier. We had never met. I got 2 graduate offers in Australia this way, as an international student.
The thing that changed my reply rate was not a better template. It was cutting most of my own achievements out of the message.
Keep your achievements to two lines
Most students write a cold message like a cover letter. Degree, WAM, internship, society exec role, the case competition. Half the message is a list of things you have done.
Cap it at two lines. Everything past that is working against you.
The rest of the message goes to why you picked this person, and what you want to learn from them.
Why your experience does not impress them
The person you are messaging has ten or twenty years on you. They have run the projects you are describing, hired people who did them, and sat through hundreds of graduate applications listing the same three things.
Your internship is not new information to them. A long list reads as someone trying to prove they deserve a reply.
There is also a practical problem. Every line you spend on your background is a line not spent on the only question they are actually asking, which is why this message arrived in their inbox and not someone else's.
What they respond to instead
Three things, in my experience, and none of them are on your resume.
A strong will to learn. Ask about how they got where they are and what they wish they had known at your stage. Senior people give that away happily. It costs them nothing and most enjoy it.
Proactiveness. Messaging someone with no job opening attached is itself the proof. You did the thing most candidates never do, and they know how rare it is because their inbox tells them.
Genuine interest in the field. Name something specific about their work or their company that you actually followed. Vague flattery is obvious and it reads worse than sending nothing.
If you want help working out who to message in your industry and what to put in the first line, book a free 15-minute call.
How the coffee chat becomes a referral
The referral is a decision the other person makes on their own, after they have met you. Your job on the call is to be worth vouching for.
Come with three or four real questions about their career and the industry. Say plainly where you are stuck. Do not ask for a referral, and do not ask whether they are hiring, because both turn a conversation into a transaction and give them a reason to end it politely.
Then follow up. Thank them, tell them what you actually did with their advice, and stay on their radar without asking for anything.
When a role opens, you are the graduate they spoke to last month who listened and then went and did the thing. That is the moment the CV gets forwarded.
What a referral actually changes
A referred CV arrives from inside the company, attached to a name the hiring manager knows, instead of sitting in an applicant pile with 300 others.
It does not guarantee the job. You still have to get through the interviews. What it buys you is the thing most international students never get: a human being reading your application properly.
You can send 100 more applications through a job board, or you can have 10 conversations this month. The second one is slower for three weeks and faster after that.
For the message itself, including the one I sent to a CEO that turned into my first graduate offer, read: How to Cold Message Someone on LinkedIn for a Grad Job.