As the fall leaves begin to turn in my part of the country, I’m reminded that another season is upon us: the season of recommendations. Like piles of leaves, requests for these documents begin accumulating as the academic hiring cycle begins and graduate school applications come due. Add to this the yearlong cycle of providing phone references and filling out forms for nonacademic jobs and the average higher ed professional is routinely tasked with providing recommendations we never learned how to give.
And that’s unfortunate—because the letter of recommendation or the reference phone call is an opportunity to establish credibility, build reputation and fulfill a professional responsibility to the benefit of all parties involved. “I recommend Jane Doe” is performative language that enacts what it names. It relies on a fundamental relationship of trust. In many cases, the recommendation must perform the work of creating that trust among parties who might not know each other well or at all.
Almost 20 years after writing my first letter of recommendation for a student, I cringe to think of the platitudes and generalizations that I thought would convince my reader. In what follows, I will describe some strategies for giving an honest, credible and above all helpful recommendation that fulfills your professional obligation in a meaningful way.
Know Your Candidate
A cardinal rule is to only recommend people you know well. Sharing how long and in what context you’ve known the person you’re recommending lends credibility to your remarks by defining the limits of your knowledge. Supervising someone for several years is different from working with them on a project for a few months as a peer. Teaching a student in one course is different from serving as their mentor. All these interactions are valuable, but they are not equivalent.
Perhaps you’ve received a recommendation request from someone you knew well 10 years ago, or in a context completely unrelated to their current professional goals. Perhaps your experience with the candidate was not as positive as they recall, or they’ve asked at the last possible minute. If your recommendation risks appearing stale, generic or unenthusiastic, you are doing the candidate a favor by declining to recommend them. You can still warmly express support for them and suggest alternative recommenders as appropriate. But to recommend credibly, you must be prepared to say no.
You must also resist immediate shortcuts such as asking your candidate to write their own letter or asking generative artificial intelligence to compose it for you (without significant edits). Candidates have a hard enough time writing about themselves when they’re not pretending to be someone else; your perspective is valuable precisely because it’s external. And speaking of external, our robot friends don’t (yet) know enough about us as individuals to share the concrete human examples that make a letter compelling.
Do Your Research
If the candidate’s timetable and expectations align with yours, and if you can offer them a personally crafted, enthusiastic recommendation for the opportunity at hand, the next step is to ask for any materials you need to prepare your recommendation. For me, this usually consists of the job description, cover letter and CV or résumé. If they do not have a cover letter available, I ask them to briefly summarize their interest in the opportunity and any aspects of their candidacy that they want me to highlight.
Learning more about the opportunity often generates follow-up questions: What has the candidate learned about it that isn’t obvious from the description? Why does the organization’s mission resonate with them? Why is this the logical next step in their career? Answering these questions helps me ground my recommendation in the reality of the person on the receiving end. At this point, if I know personal information about the candidate that I believe would strengthen my recommendation, I ask for their permission to share.
You may be thinking that this sounds like a lot of work for what many consider a perfunctory task. If so, you would be right. But remember that you can say no to a recommendation request. If you are invested enough in a candidate to recommend them, you are likely recommending them for multiple opportunities, sometimes over several months or years. Putting in the time and effort up front lets you draft a baseline recommendation letter or set of talking points that can be updated and fine-tuned as needed with minimal additional effort.
Justify Your Claims
Hiring managers typically evaluate technical skills as well as soft skills when they’re considering a candidate. There are a variety of ways to directly and accurately assess technical skills in an application or interview—in my field, for instance, at least one interview question would be asked and answered in French to determine whether a self-assessment of “near-native fluency” was accurate. It can be harder to glean interpersonal or problem-solving skills during the application process. This is where your role as a recommender becomes especially important, and where the details you choose to share can make a real difference in the candidate’s outcome.
If you understand the opportunity, and you know your candidate well within a defined context, it should be relatively straightforward to identify two or three criteria where the position and the candidate align well. For example, if I’ve identified communication, teamwork and time management as top skills for a position, I’ll brainstorm one or two times when the candidate demonstrated each of those skills. The STAR method, in which applicants reflect on actions they took in a specific situation and the outcomes of those actions, isn’t just for job seekers; recommenders can also use it to paint a vivid picture of their candidate’s strengths.
I’ve already alluded to the cringe-worthy statements I made in early recommendation letters. As a new instructor, I routinely offered broad general claims when specific examples would have been far more convincing. For example, hypothetical student Jane Doe probably isn’t the best communicator in the entire world, and she doesn’t need to be. She doesn’t even need to be the best communicator you’ve ever met. She would benefit, though, from you describing in detail one or two instances where her communication strategies were effective and impactful.
Acknowledge Room for Growth
A mentor once shared a piece of mind-blowing advice with me: It’s normal and indeed desirable to apply for roles aligned with your career path even when you don’t meet or exceed every single qualification. Doing so means that you want to learn and grow professionally, which reflects well on you as a candidate. As a recommender, whether you’re writing a letter or having a conversation, identifying a candidate’s area for growth doesn’t have to be negative—it can be an opportunity to showcase their enthusiasm for the role and understanding of its key components.
In a reference-check conversation, it’s possible that the hiring manager will ask you to share an area for growth, but it’s just as possible that they’ll try to elicit a concrete example of the candidate’s weaknesses. “I can’t think of any” isn’t a credible answer, although I’ve heard it given. It implies either that you don’t know the candidate well enough to offer a meaningful recommendation, or that you’re not being forthcoming in a setting where a professional degree of honesty is expected. This undermines trust in a way that jeopardizes all the positive things you’ve said about your candidate. Instead, your goal should be to focus on a candidate’s strengths while acknowledging their weaknesses with finesse.
When asked directly about a candidate’s weaknesses, my approach is to talk about an area where they have demonstrated self-awareness. In other words, “Jane Doe is working on prioritizing her workload so that it’s manageable for her. She’s started using project management software, and I’ve seen corresponding improvement in her ability to communicate accurate timelines. When it comes to time management, her self-reflection and responsiveness to feedback are strengths. She would benefit from additional support, such as regular one-to-ones, so she can raise workload questions as they come up.” If this opportunity really is a good fit for Jane, sharing this information will help set her up for success.
Make an Impact
In the nearly 20 years since I wrote my first recommendation letter, I’ve served on several search committees and been on the interviewee’s side of the table many times as well. What I have learned from this experience is that an honest, credible and thoughtful recommendation is worth its weight in gold. As higher ed professionals we may moan and sigh about the volume of letters we have to write, or the number of conversations we need to schedule; indeed, the entire process may seem overwhelming at first, and even discouraging if our candidate is not selected.
But the reward of giving a reliable and accurate recommendation isn’t that your candidate gets all the available offers. It’s that this person whom you’ve chosen to support through carefully selected words of advocacy receives the right offer, and that the organization extending that offer gets the right candidate in return. It’s the satisfaction of facilitating a mutually beneficial match. And it’s the joy of taking the time to see your students and colleagues the way you want others to see them—as their best professional selves.