Letter Of Recommendation: Learning The Right Strategy To Get Recommenders To Accommodate Your Request For Letters Of Recommendation
Requesting for letters of recommendation can be very difficult if you don’t know how you should go about it. Talking with a supervisor or manager so he could get your letter printed with the organization’s logo and his signature can be a challenge. How can you convince the person recommending you that you think you can do a better job writing your letter than he can? Recommenders often lack writing skills, but they don’t often lack egos.
Eversince we were little, we were taught that humility is a virtue. What will your manager think if you present some self-written letter praising yourself and asked him to sign it? He might think you’re a self-righteous person!
Approaching this situation with the right attitude and skills is a vital key to getting the letters of recommendation you need to make your career goals a reality.
Oftentimes, the reluctance of recommenders to write someone a letter of recommendation stems from these facts: they are just too busy or they can’t write very well. Most fall into the second category, but all will give the first excuse.
Even though you have a strong reason to believe that your recommender has lots of free time and that’s not really why he can’t accommodate you; never let him get the impression that you know better and that he’s not being entirely truthful.
You can tell your recommender something in this context:
“I know that you are probably too busy to write up a letter of recommendation for me, and I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t vitally important. If it’s not too much of a bother, I can write a draft letter and you could review it. I can give it to you in electronic format so that you can make whatever edits you need to. It would just take up a little of your time and it could really help me in the job that I’m applying for. Can I perhaps send it to you this week?”
For more information, including tips, samples, and templates, please check out our website: Letter Of Recommendation
This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 2:44 am and is filed under Recruitment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.