MBA Letters of recommendation

OK. So you want to get into the top 5 MBA programs in the world. I can assure you that you can do it. So the question is what do you need to do for that. The first most important thing is to target your school correctly. I have already written about how to do that here. The second thing that is incredibly important is your application essays. I have written about how to write good application essays here. Which brings me to the third pillar. A critical piece, I sometimes believe people take too lightly. I have been burned before here. So take it from me when I say “Your letters of recommendation are the third pillar on which your application stands.” It is a critical component, not a “nice to have feature”. If you do not have good and I mean fantastic letters of recommendation you are not going to be called for an interview.

Letters of recommendation is a seal of approval. How would the admissions committee of a business school know you are not a phony, the biggest liar on Earth? How would they know you didn’t just make up all the content of your essays. They haven’t interviewed you yet. So prior to the interview, just by reading your essays how can they make a call to invite you to come interview? Letters of recommendation does just that. I have a feeling business schools call you for an interview after they read your letters of recommendation.

OK, I hope I have stressed enough how important they are and how important it is that you take them seriously. Which brings up the next set of questions. Who should you chose as your recommenders, how many should you chose and what should they write about. Lets take each question.

Who should you chose as a recommender?

The first rule of thumb is to chose people who like you and are willing to spend 2 or 3 hours on that letter of recommendation. It is a lot of work and requires a certain time and effort commitment. The second consideration is their ability to write good letters. Some people have written plenty before and know how to write them. Others have never written a letter of recommendation before and you need to coach them. If they fall under the second category then you need to keep aside some of your time to coach them. Before I talk about how to coach a recommender, let me spend some time on the choosing it self.

If you read my article on writing essays, I talked about identifying blocks of your life where you did something substantial, which clearly had a beginning, a period of accomplishment and an end. My advise is to chose people who were with you in these periods of accomplishment. They may not know everything that you did but they clearly were there and their role can be proved by a common tie. For example if you wrote about an instance at work you may want to chose your supervisor. If you talked about something outside work, you may want to chose a mentor who guided and directed you. If you talked about an incident at school where you accomplished something, you may want to chose a professor or an adviser. Hopefully your essays covered different phases of your life and facets of your personality. If your essays did that, you will find that you have recommenders who know you at different periods of your life and can comment on a different aspect of your personality. Again the aim here is that the admissions committee gets to know you very well.

Do not bluff here. If you think that the business school is not going to call your recommender or Google their name and validate them you are dumb. They are going to do their homework, just like you should be doing yours. In short your recommenders also give the admissions committee insight into the kind of people you associate with and admire. So if your recommenders themselves aren’t accomplished or worthy of yours and their respect you have chosen the wrong person.

How many recommenders should you chose?

Well this is easy. As many as the school requires. But why did I call it out as a separate heading? Because some schools say 2 to 3. In which case my advise is to chose 3. The motto is always more, give the school more information about you. If given the opportunity have as many people as possible say good things about you.

What should they write about?

So this is a little tricky. You want the recommender to write a letter of recommendation in their own words, what they thought you did well and why they think you will be an asset to the school. But at the same time you want to make sure that the recommender covers all the key points you want the school to know. The key points could be but not limited to:

1. Validate what you have written in your essays and claim in your application

2. Important accomplishments, skills, personality traits that you could not cover in your application

3. A third party evaluation of your skill set

4. Insight as to why you stand out from others in a similar role with a similar skill set (more powerful if your boss of professor writes it)

5. Why they like you and think that you are special(an opportunity to personalize your application).

You get the drift. So you will have to coach your recommender if you think that the LOR may not cover all these points. The way I did this was to send my recommender a list of bullet points that I would like them to mention.  I did this because one of my recommenders knew my work a year and half ago and I thought he might have forgotten some of my accomplishments. I then told him to write it in his own words, adding or deleting what he thought was appropriate or inappropriate. This strategy made sure that the LOR would be in the words of the recommender and it would cover all the points I wanted to be covered. In then end of course I waived my right to the content of the LOR. So I am not sure what went in, but I am guessing they included a lot of what I suggested and then some.

As you can see a lot of thought goes into and should go into letters of recommendation. Make sure you put that effort in and take it seriously. LORs can make or break your application.