Variety & Excellence in Your Letters Of Recommendation

The recommendation letter process doesn’t end after you’ve selected and secured your references. To get the best recommendations possible, you need to communicate with them as much as possible.

The process of coaching your references will differ depending on how much access you have to them.

For high profile references who don’t have time to meet with you:

If one of your references is a particularly high profile person, you’re probably not going to be able to have extended chats with them about your letter, especially if you don’t know each other very well.

One of my references was a partner at my consulting firm. She knew me and we’d worked together in the past, but I knew I wasn’t going to have much face time with her. To ensure that she knew as much about me as possible, I put together a comprehensive info packet for her.

In my packet I included drafts of all of my essays and some suggestions of what she could talk about. For these suggestions I had bullet points listed of different examples from our work together that she could talk about. With each bullet point I wrote a short story summarizing each examples.

Because of the info packet, I was able to make up for the limited amount of direct communication by giving her enough material for her to refer to while writing the letter.

Just because you’re unable to meet with someone doesn’t mean you can’t give them a wealth of information about yourself.

For the more personal references who are willing to spend time meeting with you

My other two references knew me a lot better than the partner, so I had a lot more access to both of them. I was able to sit down with them or at least talk with them over the phone.

I talked to them about my basic approach to my business school applications. I told them about the 3 leadership qualities I wanted to address. I also asked for their feedback on what was missing from my application. Having multiple outside insights into your life can really help flesh out your application and cover weaknesses you might have otherwise missed.

Even though I was able to speak directly with these two references, I still gave them information packets with my essays and bullet points of the shared experiences they could talk about. Having that information to refer to just in case is always a good idea.