UPDATE: This article was originally posted on June 11, 2018. It has been updated with new information and tips below. 

During the entire application process, you should work hard to present the best possible portrait of your achievements, career goals, and fit with your dream schools. 

With such an intense focus on your “deliverables,” it’s often easy to overlook the only element of your application that provides an image of you from an outsider’s perspective: your letters of recommendation. 

This is a critical perspective for the admissions committee, as they can gather information on how successful executives view your talents and overall potential. Therefore, you want to devote significant time and attention to this area of your application.

However, many ideal recommenders may be too busy to write a letter or too difficult to work with, or they may simply deliver a mediocre letter that falls short of selling you. 

To ensure you avoid these pitfalls, we’ve created this comprehensive guide to MBA letters of recommendation that will guide you through the process and help you secure standout references. 

 

What role do rec letters play in the admissions process?

Though the format varies slightly from school to school in accordance with a particular school’s values, most programs generally use the letter of recommendation to validate the image you have portrayed in your application. 

To streamline the process, many schools use the GMAC Common Letter of Recommendation, which includes four basic questions:

1. Please provide a brief description of your interaction with the applicant and, if applicable, the applicant’s role in your organization.
2. How does the performance of the applicant compare to that of other well-qualified individuals in similar roles? (E.g. what are the applicant’s principal strengths?)
3. Describe the most important piece of constructive feedback you have given the applicant. Please detail the circumstances and the applicant’s response.
4. Is there anything else we should know? (Optional)

Each school can decide the maximum or recommended word count for each question, but it generally hovers around 500 words. 

Within this structure, your recommender should have ample opportunity to highlight what makes you unique while reinforcing (through the “constructive feedback” question) that you are someone who takes criticism well and constantly looks for chances to self-reflect and improve. 

Regardless of the format, letters of recommendation are one of the most important factors that will ultimately influence whether you find a spot at an elite business school or end up lower in the candidate pool.

We will go more into what separates good from great letters a bit later on.

 

Who should write your letters?

Though you can’t control the actual content of the letters of recommendation sent on your behalf, you do have the power to choose who you ask to recommend you. 

For some candidates, this might be an easy or automatic decision, yet choosing the right people for the job will ultimately determine if your letters shine or flop. 

When choosing your recommenders, you should always select professionals you have recently worked with who are able to talk in detail about you as a professional. Additionally, some business schools set out guidelines or preferences for recommenders that you should be sure to follow. 

 

CURRENT SUPERVISOR

Who knows your professional potential at this very moment better than your current boss? After all, he or she directly manages your deliverables, is responsible for supporting your promotions, and is tasked with giving you regular feedback. 

Given your current boss’ in-depth understanding of how you perform at work, it’s no surprise that all MBA programs directly ask you to include a letter from your current supervisor, if possible. 

In certain cases, you don’t have a current supervisor because you are self-employed or an entrepreneur. In other cases, your current supervisor is not in a position to write you a letter, such as if you cannot disclose to your employer that you are applying for an MBA or your direct supervisor is a family member. 

For example, when working with our client Michel, his bank was laying off massive numbers of employees while he was preparing his application. He was counting on his bonus from the bank to help finance his MBA, and he knew that he’d be fired if the bank learned of his plans to leave. As such, we decided not to ask for a letter from his current boss, opting instead for a letter from a former boss who had left the bank one year prior. By doing this, we were able to get an accurate view of Michel’s day-to-day performance without compromising his career. 

If you can’t ask your current supervisor for a letter of recommendation, you should choose an alternative recommender — such as a business partner, board member, former direct supervisor or even client — to write your letter. Just make sure to address this decision in the Optional Essay you send to the school. 

 

SECOND RECOMMENDER 

The second letter of recommendation is slightly more complex. 

Since this letter cannot come from your current boss, you must strategically choose a second person whose insights enhance your profile. 

According to Chicago Booth:

The other letter can come from another professional contact or from someone who has worked with you in an organization or club, or on a volunteer project. This letter can offer a different perspective on your skill sets outside of your professional environment.

We have no preference regarding who supplies your second letter of recommendation.

Our only guideline is that it should add new and valuable insight to your candidacy.

However, the key is to choose someone who can add the right kind of valuable insight. 

Though you may know the Pope well enough to ask for a letter, this might not necessarily be a good choice for your application. 

As such, it can be a good idea to think about what image you are trying to portray to the business schools, then consider how your essays, CV, and letter from your current supervisor reinforce this brand. After mapping this, select a second recommender who can add new insights into your personal brand and complement what has already been said. 

 

How should you ask a potential recommender to write a letter

One of the questions our clients ask most often is how to approach someone they have worked with for a letter of recommendation. 

In short, there is no “standard way” to ask for a letter of recommendation. Instead, the way you go about requesting recommendations will most often depend on the relationship you have with the people you ask. 

For example, if you and your boss have been working together for quite some time and have a very close relationship (perhaps you’ve even spoken to him or her about your interest in pursuing an MBA!), an email or phone call asking them to recommend you could be the perfect format. 

However, if you live in a country where business culture is more formal or want to ask for a letter from someone you don’t interact with daily, a formal meeting or business lunch could be a better format. 

Regardless of when and where you ask for a recommendation, make sure you are always polite about your request. 

Remember, your recommender will gain nothing in return for writing your letter and is most likely an extremely busy professional. Make sure they know how much you appreciate the effort they would need to dedicate to writing a winning letter of recommendation! 

Additionally, once a recommender agrees to write a letter, it’s important to keep them well aware of deadlines and updates on your MBA application process – especially good news!

 

Choosing different recommenders for different schools

Though your best strategy may be to have the same two people recommend you for every school’s application, you may want to vary your recommenders if you have more than two people you’ve worked with closely. 

For example, we recently worked with Alicia, who had been managed by two Harvard Business School grads and one MIT Sloan grad in the past year. When she applied to Harvard, we asked for letters from the alumni, yet when she applied to MIT, we asked for a letter from one HBS alum and brought in the MIT alum to complement this letter. 

In general, if you have worked closely with an alumnus of one of your target schools, you should try to include them as a recommender in your application to that school.

Looking for the exact Letter of Recommendation questions for your target schools? Our MBA Resource Library has LOR guides for dozens of top schools, as well as numerous sample essays, mock sequences, exclusive guides, and CV templates. Click to join! 

 

A special note for consultants 

If you work as a consultant for a major firm, it can be difficult to determine who is your “current supervisor” considering you work on multiple cases each year with different managers.

 

Strategy: The Three Rs

Therefore, when choosing your recommenders, we suggest considering the three Rs: recent, remarkable, and relevant. 

• Recent: Make sure you have worked with the recommender recently. In consulting, 2 years is usually a long time, so try to choose recommenders from the last year or so.

• Remarkable: Try to choose recommenders that worked with you on cases where you had major contributions and stood out from your peers. Good choices include international projects and projects in which you had leadership experience. 

• Relevant: Make sure you choose projects that reinforce your personal brand. If you are presenting the story that you want to be a Private Equity specialist in your firm, try to choose at least one recommender who can speak to your ability to tackle tough PE projects. 

ASK SOONER RATHER THAN LATER

The other issue for consultants is the sheer number of your peers who are also applying for MBAs at similar schools.

In many firms, certain partners only write one letter per school or recommend only one candidate per year. Considering how important the letters of recommendation are to building your story with the admissions committee, choose your recommenders and get their formal “ok” as early as possible. 

After all, when applying to elite business schools, every little boost helps, so make sure you have your greatest supporters on board!

 

How to register recommenders

One of the most common questions we get from clients is how the recommendation process actually works. Luckily, it’s actually quite streamlined!

Once you’ve created a new online application for the school, you can navigate to the “Recommenders” tab. Then, input your recommenders’ information (be careful to double-check that you have not misspelled anything, especially email addresses!), waive your right to review, and click “send.” 

After you click “send”, the school’s system will automatically email your recommender a link and instructions on how to submit their letter. 

 

How to submit MBA recommendation letters

After you click “send” in the online application system, your recommender will receive a link to submit your letter. In most cases, your recommender simply needs to click the link, fill out their information, and click “submit”.

TOP TIP: Ask your recommenders to write their letter in a separate Word document before submitting it. If they write their answers directly into the online form, they could make typos or hurriedly submit the application with sub-par information to check this to-do off of their lists. 

 

What if your recommender doesn’t speak English?

If you’ve worked in a non-English speaking country, your current supervisor or other recommenders may not know English well enough to write a meaningful letter. 

Many applicants feel that this is reason enough to exclude this person from consideration, yet choosing a recommender whose letter is less aligned with your personal brand or less descriptive of your merits as an applicant simply because they speak fluent English is a mistake. 

Business schools understand this dilemma. 

That’s why it’s perfectly fine for your recommender to write the letter in his or her native language, then have the letter translated. To maintain the integrity of the letter, we suggest that you don’t translate it yourself. 

If your recommender does not speak English well, you may also want to provide extra instructions in your native language on how to submit the letter, considering they may not understand the prompts they receive on the online form.

Though it requires a little extra work, if your best possible recommender does not speak English, it’s worth the effort to make sure they are able to voice their support of your application. 

Best practices

At the end of the day, though an outstanding letter of recommendation is critical to your application, you are asking a very busy professional to do what is essentially a favor. 

As such, following a few best practices not only ensures the process goes smoothly but also that you have a winning letter of recommendation submitted on time on your behalf. 

 

GIVE YOUR RECOMMENDER PLENTY OF TIME

As we’ve mentioned before, writing a letter of recommendation is more often than not a favor done on your behalf. Recommenders do not receive anything in return for completing this task, so it’s important to make the process as streamlined as possible. 

This includes making sure you give them plenty of time to write the letter of recommendation, especially if you are applying in Round 2 (when letters are due in January, shortly after the holiday season). 

Our client Lorena, for example, was nervous about asking for a letter of recommendation and put off asking for the letter until two weeks before the Round 2 deadline, thinking this would give her recommender more than enough time to write her letter. 

However, she was unaware that this recommender would be traveling to Asia for a family vacation the day after she asked for the letter. Though her recommender agreed, he was not happy about having to spend part of his long-awaited vacation writing a letter. 

Other clients who failed to ask early have identified the perfect person to reinforce their personal brand, only to be told “no,” as the person didn’t have enough time to write the letter. 

As such, to ensure you get the best possible letter from the best possible person, ask for letters of recommendation in advance. 

For Round 1, we suggest asking at least 1 month in advance. For Round 2, given the proximity to the holidays, we suggest asking at least 2 months in advance. 

By managing your timeline well, you can ensure your letters of recommendation portray a strong image of your potential to prestigious business schools. 

 

SHARE GENERAL LETTER GUIDELINES

For some professionals, this may be the first time they have written a letter of recommendation.

What constitutes a winning letter of recommendation may be obvious for you but is a mystery for your recommender. 

Looking for the exact Letter of Recommendation questions for your target schools? Our MBA Resource Library has LOR guides for dozens of top schools, as well as numerous sample essays, mock sequences, exclusive guides, and CV templates. Click to join! 

As such, providing your recommender with clear guidelines about how to write their letter is essential. 

For example, consider these two letters of recommendation, both for INSEAD:

Comment on the candidate’s potential for senior management. Do you see him/her as a future leader? 

I see Matt as a current leader. Most recently, Matt was promoted to co-head of sales, migrating from team leader of our healthcare practice to co-manage our sales efforts company wide, reporting directly to me. I promoted Matt to this position precisely because of his leadership skills and consistency.

VERSUS:

Comment on the candidate’s potential for senior management. Do you see him/her as a future leader? 

During my career, I have supervised many excellent professionals, but Richard displays some traits that I find mandatory for any leader and that make him a unique professional. First of all, I would like to highlight his outstanding criteria for analyzing complex situations and making tough decisions. Before making any decision, he spends time and effort understanding the whole situation and all the parties involved. In the sale of the hospital concession that I mentioned earlier, in the negotiations phase, he had very little time to analyze the offer made by the buyer and prepare a counter-proposal that would satisfy our client’s and the buyer’s objectives. In a short period of time, he understood both negotiations positions and found a way to solve the problem. This is just one example that shows how Richard is always highly prepared for meetings and acts quickly to find solutions to the main bottlenecks of any transaction.

In addition to the above, a capability that really distinguishes Richard from his peers is his ability to keep, even in extremely tough situations or very demanding tasks, a good environment with all the different teams he has led until now, maintaining an efficient and productive atmosphere. I had the chance to work with him and his colleagues on very tough transactions that demanded a lot of overtime and Richard was always motivated and ready to help and teach his colleagues. He has a special ability to teach and I can see this in the development of the rest of the analysts and trainees under his responsibility. He has helped me to train new members and keep a highly qualified Corporate Finance team. As a leader, you should know how to delegate work and Richard has the ability to find the right person for the right task and then supervise the work properly, giving support and space for each person to grow.  

This mix of qualities and traits together with his unique capacity to learn, makes Richard an outstanding professional and I am sure that he will become a great leader in the Latin American financial market.

The letter for Matt is a bit of a disaster. The recommender fails to use specific examples to show not tell why Matt will be a great leader. Furthermore, she makes careless typos that may indicate to a skilled admissions officer that writing this letter was far from a priority for this recommender, calling into question how much she really supports Matt’s candidacy.

Richard’s letter, on the other hand, is full of rich details and qualifying phrases that show how Richard stands head and shoulders above the rest. 

When orienting your recommenders, make sure you let them know how important an error-free, example-rich letter is to ensure your letter ends up like Richard’s.

 

SEND YOUR CVS OR ESSAYS AS REFERENCE

Though it’s not a good idea to tell your recommender what to say in your letter (more on that below), it can be a good idea to show them how you are positioning yourself for each university to ensure they write an MBA letter of recommendation that fits your brand. 

We suggest sending a copy of your MBA CV and at least a rough draft of your essays to your recommender, so they have something to go by when sitting down to write your letter. 

 

AVOID GHOSTWRITING

MBA letters of recommendation are valuable to elite business schools because they allow admissions committees to understand your merits as a candidate from an objective point of view. 

That means that business schools want your letters to be written by your recommenders — not by you. 

Writing letters of recommendation is a time-consuming task, so more and more executives are asking applicants to write their own letters of recommendation, which the recommender will then “approve.”

This is a practice that should be avoided at all costs, as it will ruin your application. 

Business schools are highly trained to root out suspicious letters of recommendation that appear to have been written by the applicant. If they think you wrote your own letter, your application could be removed from consideration, ending your chance to attend an elite business school. 

Therefore, if your recommender asks you to write the letter, we suggest setting a time to meet with them to go over why this is not an ideal option and help them understand the process of writing more in-depth. Often, a simple adjustment (like letting your recommender know he or she can write the letter in their native language) is enough to solve this issue. 

 

OFFER YOUR SUPPORT FOR NON-NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS 

When working with recommenders who do not speak English as a first language, the letter of recommendation process can seem especially daunting. 

Though it’s always possible to translate the letter from your recommender’s native language into English, sometimes navigating the online system in order to submit the letter provides an additional challenge.

As such, many of our clients offer to sit down with their recommenders and help them input everything into the online system. Though we’re not suggesting you set a time to sit down and write the letter for your recommender, setting aside some time to help translate the form and ensure your letter is actually sent off is perfectly appropriate. 

 

DON’T BE AFRAID TO FOLLOW UP

You scheduled a meeting to ask for a recommendation letter, secured their commitment, shared best practices, and even sent copies of your admissions essays and MBA CVs, yet the deadline is getting closer and closer, and your letter of recommendation hasn’t been submitted yet. 

Considering how many things your recommender has on his or her plate, it’s not uncommon for your letter of recommendation to be put off. 

To ensure a solid letter is written on your behalf, make sure to politely follow up every so often. Doing so will keep your letter of recommendation on your recommender’s radar. 

After all is said and done, don’t forget to genuinely thank your recommender for the role they played in preparing a winning business school application. 

 

Nervous about letters of recommendation?

Recommendations can be a deciding factor in your application. They can give you the push you need to secure an interview or acceptance, or they can land you in the rejection pile.

We’ve worked with many students whose letters of recommendation were initially working against them, not for them. By working with our highly-specialized team, you can ensure this doesn’t happen to you.

Whether you need help selecting recommenders or navigating the recommendation process, you can count on our years of expertise to ensure your letters of recommendation enhance your application. 

If you’d like to start putting the Ellin Lolis Advantage to work for you right from the very start, apply to work with us today!