Letters of Reference are often requested. Before you ask for a reference or write a reference, there are a few things you will want to consider.

Recommendation Messages and Letters

Recommendation messages are vital to getting hired, nominated for awards, and membership into organizations. They offer trusted-source testimonials about a candidate’s worthiness for whatever they’re applying to. Like the résumé and cover letter they corroborate, their job is to persuade an employer or selection committee to accept the person in question. To be convincing, recommendation and reference letters must be specific, true, and objective.

SPECIFIC

Recommendation and reference letters must focus entirely on the candidate with details such as examples of accomplishments, including dates or date ranges in months and years. A generic recommendation plagiarized from the internet is worse than useless because it makes the applicant look like they’re unworthy of a properly targeted letter.

TRUE

Exaggerations and outright lies will hurt the candidate when found out (e.g., in response to job interview questions and background checks). If the employer sees that source cross their desk again, it will spoil the changes of any future applicants who use recommendations from the same source, even if the recommendation is without exaggerations.

OBJECTIVE

An endorsement from a friend or family member will be seen as subjective to the point of lacking any credibility. Recommendations must, therefore, come from a business owner, employer, manager, or supervisor who can offer an unbiased assessment.

To write or not to write

Not all employers require recommendation letters of their job candidates, so only bother seeking a recommendation letter when it’s asked for. Opinions are divided on whether such documents are actually helpful, since they are almost always “glowing” because they tend not to say anything negative about the applicant despite the expectation that they be objective. Some employers—especially in larger organizations—are instructed not to write recommendation letters (or are limited in what they can say if called for a reference) because they leave the company that writes them open to lawsuits from both the applicant and recipient company if things don’t work out.

On the other hand, recommendation letters provide potential employers with valuable validation of the job applicant’s claims, so it’s worth knowing how to ask for one and what to ask for if they’re required as part of a hiring process. Even if it may be some years before you’re in a position to write such letters yourself, knowing what information to provide the person who agrees to write you a recommendation is useful to you now. Indeed, since most managers are busy people, they might even ask you to draft it for them so they can plug it into a company letterhead template, sign it, and send it along. If so, then you could ghost-write it using the following section as your guide.

Lynda.com has a great video that provides an overview of how to write letters of recommendation:^[2]

Recommendation Letters

STRUCTURE & ORGANIZATION

A recommendation letter is a direct-approach message framed by a modified-block formal letter using company letterhead. The most effective letters are targeted to an employer for a specific job application, though it’s not uncommon to request a “To Prospective Employers” recommendation letter without a recipient address to be distributed as part of any job application. In any case, the following represents the standard expectations employers have for recommendation letter content and organization and includes the opening, the body of the letter, and the closing.

OPENING

• Identify the applicant by name, the position sought, and the confidential nature of the letter
  • Example: This confidential letter is written at the request of Elizabeth Barrie in support of her application for the position of Legal Assistant at Bailey & Garrick Law.
• Clarify the writer’s relationship to the applicant and the length of its duration
  • Example: For three years I have been Ms. Barrie’s supervisor at Stanton & Sons Legal Counsel and can therefore say with confidence that she would be a valuable addition to your firm.

BODY

• Identify the job applicant’s previous duties
  • Example: Ms. Barrie began working for us as a part-time legal research assistant during her studies in the Law Clerk program at Algonquin College. She began with mainly clerical duties such as preparing official legal documents and archiving our firm’s records.
• Give examples of the applicant’s accomplishments and professional attributes. Wherever achievements are quantifiable, include numbers
  • Example: After initiating and executing a records digitization project involving over 12,000 files, Ms. Barrie conducted more extensive legal research activities. Her superior organizational skills and close attention to detail made her a highly dependable assistant that our six associate lawyers and two partners relied on heavily to conduct research tasks. Her conscientiousness meant that she required very little direction and oversight when performing her duties.
• Compare the applicant to others
  • Example: Without a doubt, Ms. Barrie has been our most productive and trusted legal assistant in the past decade.

CLOSING

• Summarize and emphatically state the endorsement
  • Example: Any law firm would be lucky to have such a consummate professional as Ms. Barrie in their employ. I highly recommend her without reservation. If you would like to discuss this endorsement further, please contact me at the number above.

Because honesty is of paramount importance in a recommendation letter, including specific evidence of performance flaws wouldn’t be out of place, especially if used in a narrative of promotion and improvement. Including criticism of the candidate helps the credibility of the endorsement because it makes it more believable. After all, no one is perfect. Criticism resolved by a narrative of improvement, however, strengthens the endorsement even further.

Example: Ms. Barrie tended to sacrifice quantity of completed research tasks to quality, completing perhaps 17 out of an expected 25 assignments per day. However, she increased her speed and efficiency such that, in her last year with us, she was completing more tasks with higher accuracy than any other assistant we’ve ever had.

Of course, this general frame for recommendations can be adapted and either extended or trimmed for channels other than letters. LinkedIn, for instance, allows users to endorse each other, but the small window in which the endorsement appears favours a smaller word count than the typical letter format. In that case, one paragraph of highlights and a few details is more appropriate than several paragraphs, especially if you can get several such endorsements from a variety of network contacts.

Requesting a recommendation letter

When a recommendation is necessary, be sure to ask a manager, supervisor, or professor who’s known you for two years or more if they can provide you with a strong reference. If they can’t—because they’re prohibited from doing so by company policy or they honestly don’t think you’re worthy of an endorsement—they’ll probably just recommend that you find and ask someone who would. Don’t be shy about asking for one, though. If they aren’t directed otherwise, management understands that writing such messages is part of their job.

Since every employment and educational situation you’re in provides an opportunity for a reference when it’s time to move on, you should always do your best so that you can get a strong reference out of it.

When you ask for a letter of recommendation, be sure to provide your potential referee with sufficient information:

• Remind them of who you are: what position(s) you’ve worked in their company or which class(es) you took with them as professor.
• Remind them of any awards or honours you received; if you are asking a professor for a reference, remind them of your final score and mention any projects that you did particularly well on.
• Tell them what you are applying for (a job, internship, program or volunteer opportunity).
• Explain what you’ll be doing in the proposed position.
• Suggest the relevant skills, attributes and knowledge that you believe your referee can attest to.

Remember, your English professor cannot attest to your industry knowledge but can comment on your communication skills!

References

Vance, K. (n.d.). Communication at work (adapted for KPU from Jordan Smith’s (n.d.) Communication @ work). https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/communicationsatwork/ CC By 4.0 license ↵

LinkedIn Learning. (2014, June 9). Productivity tutorial: Writing a letter of recommendation [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB882puILhM ↵

Attribution

This chapter is an adaptation of Goodwill Messages and Recommendations  by Confederation College and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. You can download this book free at Intercultural Business Communication Copyright © 2021.