Asking for letters of recommendation is always difficult. It’s hard to know when to ask, how to ask, who to ask, how much time to give them, and what to tell them you need, but getting all these questions right is essential to gathering recommendations that will make your application stand out from the crowd.
GMAT Ninja, a professional GMAT tutor and B-School admissions consultant, shares some thoughts on the importance of recommendations, as well as some general tips about selecting the most appropriate and effective people for the job.
One great observation from GMAT Ninja is choosing a relevant recommender is very important and that relevance must pay some regard to the timing of their relationship with you. He writes:
“If, for example, your recommender is your supervisor from a job you had eight years ago, he or she might be completely unable to speak competently about your current skills and situation. Worse yet, the recommendation will make the adcom wonder why you can’t get a more recent colleague or supervisor to write a recommendation for you.”
It had never occurred to me that simply choosing an old supervisor might convey an inability to garner a more current opinion. It makes me itch to go back and look at my grad school applications, as I’m pretty sure that I have a manger from one of my first retail jobs as a recommender not because I couldn’t get someone more recent, but because I knew he would be effusive in his praise.
For more about the importance of recommendations to graduate school admissions commissions read the rest of GMAT ninjas post here.