Whom Should You Choose to Be a Recommender?
• Someone who knows you well enough—and cares enough about you—to take the time to answer the questions we ask. They
require more than a list of adjectives—we are hoping to hear about real episodes that let us know more about you. DEE LEOPOLD, HARVARD
• A strong recommendation can only come from someone who really knows the candidate. They’ve worked closely with the candidate and seen him or her in difficult situations and in successful ones. They know the candidate professionally and personally. As a result, they can speak in depth about the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. SALLY JAEGER, TUCK
• A good recommender will know you and care about whether you get in. (Only people who care will take the immense amount of time necessary to do a good recommendation.) He or she will care about you as a person and as a professional—and will have stories and examples to tell about you that will showcase your strengths and make you come alive on paper. SHARON HOFFMAN, STANFORD
• For those in a family business: Do not use your parents as recommenders. Instead, use a supplier, a customer, or someone else who can be objective about you. MICHELE ROGERS, KELLOGG
• If you are self-employed, consider getting a client or customer to write on your behalf. Do not get a relative to write for you. If necessary, consider your accountant, your lawyer, a person from the local chamber of commerce, or your venture capitalist. ANN W. RICHARDS, JOHNSON (CORNELL)
• The people you choose should know who you are, what your potential is, and what you can contribute. These are usually your supervisors at work. LINDA MEEHAN, COLUMBIA
• If you have been at your current employer for less than a year, consider submitting a recommendation from your current supervisor as a third (additional) recommendation, labeling it as such. Get your two primary recommendations from your former employer.
ANN W. RICHARDS, JOHNSON (CORNELL)
• Our students tend to be older, and generally it will be nine or more years since they were at university. Consequently we recommend that applicants obtain references from recent employers, ideally their immediate superiors with whom they have worked. SÉAN RICKARD, CRANFIELD (UK)
Should You Approach a Colleague, Direct Supervisor, or Someone Higher Up?
• Choose someone who has evaluated you in a workplace or professional context. Get your direct supervisor, one level above you.
Choosing someone at the top of the organization is worthless unless he or she has worked closely with you; in fact, we’ll question your judgment for doing so. We want content over flash. SHARON HOFFMAN, STANFORD
• We ask that one of your recommendations come from your direct supervisor, the person who has worked with you most recently and ideally knows you best on a day-in, day-out basis. That said, there may be specific circumstances when that is not a good idea. For example, if you’ve only worked for someone for a couple of months, and telling them you want to go to business school will get you fired or cost you your bonus. Or you may work at a family business and your boss is your mother. If that is the case, you may want to have a more objective party, like a client or vendor, do the recommendation. The second one should also be a professional recommendation. It can come from a previous supervisor, a professional colleague, a client, or a supplier: someone who can comment on your business acumen. We want someone who can provide real insight into you as a professional. ISSER GALLOGLY, STERN (NYU)
• We want the superior who knows you best and can speak specifically about you and your accomplishments, which may not be the CEO, the president, or a senator. This isn’t a test of whom you can get access to. J. J. CUTLER, WHARTON
• We like to see an evaluation from someone with direct knowledge of an applicant’s professional strengths and weaknesses. The person should see you on an everyday basis and have responsibility for your work. We do not like recommendations from coworkers, nor do we like recommendations from professors (unless the two of you went into business together). By the same token, we do not want to have the president of your company write niceties about you. ANN W. RICHARDS, JOHNSON (CORNELL)
• Immediate supervisors are generally a better choice than someone much higher in the company. DAWNA CLARKE, TUCK
• If the recommender knows the candidate’s work very well, she is likely to do a much better job of selling it to us. The recommender’s rank is less important than her knowledge of the candidate. The ideal recommender is someone who knows you well and is successful, because someone who has made it to the top has seen a lot of success and can comment knowledgeably on it. MICHELE ROGERS, KELLOGG
• We’re not impressed by title. Get your direct supervisor, and/or perhaps the person he or she reports to, to write for you. JOELLE DU LAC, INSEAD
Must Your Boss Be One of Your Recommenders?
• It’s good to use your boss, but if you can’t, use a former colleague who has since left the company or a customer or supplier—
someone you’ve worked with. JAMES MILLAR, HARVARD
• Not all jobs are of the “two or three years then on to business school” variety, where a manager expects someone to leave and will provide a recommendation. Having to declare to a company in October that you’ll be leaving in August for an MBA means that you’ll be working for a long time under difficult circumstances, so we understand applicants having, for example, a former supervisor perhaps at a prior company writing a recommendation for them. ANNE COYLE, YALE
• If using your current supervisor would jeopardize your position, choose a past supervisor. We understand how this can be necessary. SALLY JAEGER, TUCK
Should You Favor Workplace, Academic, or Other Sources?
• Certainly, if you’ve been working for three to five years (or more), we prefer professional recommendations to academic ones.
SALLY JAEGER, TUCK
• We prefer professional recommendations to any other kind. It’s a “business school,” and “business” comes first. We have a sense of your academic abilities from the transcript, the GMAT, etc., and we have a sense of you from your essays. The recommendations are the only part of the application that comes from an independent third party, so we really want that to be about you as a professional and about your career. ISSER GALLOGLY, STERN (NYU)
• Having all recommendations from the workplace is fine. If that’s not possible, use your best judgment. DEE LEOPOLD, HARVARD
What Should a Recommender Say?
• We want to see whether you are able to handle challenges, work under pressure, work in a team, and add value to your department and company. ANN W. RICHARDS, JOHNSON (CORNELL)
• A short recommendation filled with adjectives is too easy to write. It’s also boring as well as unmemorable. A strong recommendation supports its points by discussing meaningful examples. It helps the candidate stand out, be three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional. ANNE COYLE, YALE
• A recommendation is the only external observation of a candidate, so we look for recommenders to be as honest and insightful as possible. We want to learn whether someone will be a good fit in our community, whether he or she possesses the leadership, teamwork, and ability to work in a multicultural environment necessary to succeed here. We want to know whether we can help him or her achieve. A recommender should write more, not less, and should give us examples when possible. Remember, we’re not looking for perfect people; we’d have nothing to teach them. ROSE MARTINELLI, CHICAGO
• We are looking for people who have demonstrated that they can follow through on projects and accomplish things, not just get along with people. A great recommendation does this. It has depth, examples which explain how and why this person is in the top 5 percent—it demonstrates what makes the person so outstanding. It should, of course, be well written. JUDITH GOODMAN, MICHIGAN
• Try to get recommendations of an appropriate length. If they’re too short, we don’t learn enough about you. If they’re too long, they’re hard to synthesize. JOELLE DU LAC, INSEAD
What Are the Worst Mistakes People Make?
• Too many applicants fail to treat recommendations as part of the application process. They don’t give people time to complete the process, or they don’t give them sufficient information. Manage up. You need to sit down with your recommender to explain matters. Don’t accept having to write a recommendation yourself and then giving it to your recommender to sign. THOMAS CALEEL, WHARTON
• “Coffee-break recommendations” don’t work. This is our term for what a recommender produces when he or she did not have or take the time to do a serious job. This is often because a recommender is forced into writing a recommendation without really knowing the candidate. SALLY JAEGER, TUCK
• The worst mistake is choosing the wrong people to be recommenders—perhaps because they don’t know the candidate in the workplace, such as a professor or someone involved in a community activity. The second worst mistake is choosing the right person, but having that person writing a very brief recommendation that doesn’t give us any more information about the candidate. This generally results from a failure to make clear to the recommender the importance of a good, in-depth recommendation. When people select recommenders, they should sit down with them and discuss their goals, their achievements in the position, and so on—so the recommender can write a thoughtful, complete recommendation. DAN McCLEARY, FUQUA (DUKE)
• If we receive a bad reference for a candidate it will be decisive. So the worst mistake a candidate can make is not thinking carefully about who will (a) be prepared to take the time and effort to give them a thoughtful reference and (b) is likely to be positive. That said a reference where everything is perfect is viewed skeptically. SÉAN RICKARD, CRANFIELD (UK)
• Perhaps the worst mistake is to misevaluate your recommender and ask the wrong person to write for you. Doing so tells us a lot about your judgment. JOELLE DU LAC, INSEAD
Should You Submit Additional Recommendations?
• An additional recommendation is appropriate when someone can contribute an additional, different perspective. For example, perhaps a professor has continued as your mentor. If you’ve been deeply involved in an outside activity, we like to hear from that organization. SALLY JAEGER, TUCK
• After you’ve gotten the two required recommendations, if you think there’s somebody who can write about something totally different than those two wrote and that it will give us a better insight into who you are, you might want to include it. But if it’s just another one—because you ran into your CEO in an elevator, and you thought that would make a difference to us—don’t bother.
LINDA MEEHAN, COLUMBIA
• A lot of things in the application process are a matter of judgment. Consider what the extra recommendation is for, how it’s going to be helpful, what additional insight it will provide. Getting a third recommendation about your community involvement because it’s incredibly important to who you are as a person and to your career endeavors may be a good idea. Occasionally a third recommendation is a really good idea, but if it’s not going to add value, it probably will undermine the strength of your application.
ISSER GALLOGLY, STERN (NYU)
• SDA Bocconi requires two letters of recommendation, possibly one from the academic world and the other from the professional context. . . . We don’t encourage candidates to look for additional recommendations. ROSSANA CAMERA, BOCCONI (ITALY) The Value of Letters of Support
• I think it’s great, particularly at Stern. Fit and community are so important here. When you have a vote of confidence from the Stern community—an administrator, faculty member, alum, or current student—that provides additional assurance that you will probably be a good fit. These people know this community and know what it takes to thrive in this environment. Of course, inundating the admissions committee with a pile of letters that all say the same thing isn’t a good idea. At some point it’s a bit much. If each one gives additional insight, great—but at a certain point, enough’s enough. We get the message that there are people in the Stern community who think you’re great. ISSER GALLOGLY, STERN (NYU)
• Those who know the program have a good sense of who would be a good fit for the school as well as who would be a good member of their team. So if it’s coming from a current student or alum or friend of the school (such as someone on the board of visitors), that letter can be significant, and we’d welcome it. From someone not connected with the school, we’d expect a formal recommendation instead. DAN McCLEARY, FUQUA (DUKE)
Other
• As a general rule, we’re more concerned with what others say about you than what you say about yourself. We want to see whether you leave a trail of satisfied customers. SHARON HOFFMAN, STANFORD
• The grid ratings are helpful. It’s surprising how many people get very low grid marks. We put the marks into context, of course, since recommenders have all sorts of ways of evaluating people. THOMAS CALEEL, WHARTON
• Take the time to develop strong relationships with those who are going to be your recommenders. Sometimes that takes a bit more than just working with them. Sometimes it requires building the relationship over the occasional lunch or meeting about your future goals in order to nurture the relationship. Bringing them into the application process early can also help. Seeking their opinion about your choices, talking with them about your goals, and perhaps walking through the recommendation questions with them can help, too. Really take the time to discuss the recommendation in depth with them. ISSER GALLOGLY, STERN (NYU)
• We don’t offer an online recommendation. We want to see (and feel and “taste”) the letterhead on which a recommendation is written. Similarly, if two recommendations resemble each other too closely, we’ll worry about their authenticity. ANNE COYLE, YALE
• Recommenders often tip us off to potential personal problems by giving a lesser mark on maturity, for instance, or noting that an area for development is learning to communicate effectively with associates. In such cases, we’d want to interview the candidate.
PETER JOHNSON, HAAS
MAKE SURE THE RECOMMENDATIONS ARE SUBMITTED ON TIME
The schools can keep you informed as to whether a given recommendation has arrived. If it has not arrived and time is getting short, contact your recommender and ask very politely how her effort is progressing and whether you can be helpful by giving her more information. This will tend to prod her into action without being annoying.