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Your business school recommendations will be a critical part of your application. If your letters are specific, are evidence-based, and demonstrate advocacy, they can go a long way in increasing your chances of acceptance.  

Managing the Recommendation Process

To maximize the quality of your recommendations while minimizing friction, we recommend the following steps: 

1. Select recommenders who know you well, are senior to you and are very enthusiastic about your candidacy. Choose people whose days & lives you have made better—and they know it! 
2. Prepare your recommenders. Since they must write separate letters and fill out forms on each school’s website, you want to do everything you can to make your recommenders’ job easy for them. This includes providing them with: 
   1. Details on the submittal process, questions asked, and timeline. 
   2. Your resume. 
   3. Material about you, including accomplishments and traits that that they have witnessed and have enabled your success to date.
3. Manage your recommenders. For many applicants, the recommendations are the most stressful piece of the application process. That is because while you can control your own actions, you cannot control the actions of your recommenders. But you can and should influence them! Follow up periodically to make sure your recommendations are being submitted on time. 
4. Keep your recommenders up to date on the outcomes so they feel a part of the process.   
5. Thank your recommenders, often with a small gift of appreciation. Do this no matter what, regardless of a school’s final decision on your candidacy.  

Selecting the Best Recommenders

When selecting your recommender, keep in mind that your recommender should be: 

• Someone who knows you well. The facts and evidence are crucial; someone who does not know you well will not be able to convey enough detail about who you are and why you would be a strong addition to a school’s MBA class. 
• Someone who is senior to you. Someone senior to you can compare you objectively to others at your tenure and evaluate your performance. 
• (Ideally) someone who is from your current company, ideally a manager. If one of your recommenders is a current manager, the schools will have the most updated and clearest picture of you and your accomplishments.

Your recommender does not need to be: 

• An alumnus/a of the school you are targeting. Do not choose an alum over someone who knows you better and therefore better sing your praise. The quality of the letter is much more important than where the recommender went to school. 
• Your current supervisor, no matter what. There are acceptable reasons not to ask your current supervisor (e.g., you have not been working for them long or you are reticent to mention your plans of applying to business school). The schools understand these things. If you cannot ask a current supervisor, try to ask a recent past supervisor.  
• From a different company than your other recommender. It is fine if both of your recommenders are from the same company, and this strategy can sometimes even be advantageous. That said, if you do select two recommenders from the same company, prep them to focus on different stories so that the schools learn something new about you from each letter.    
• Someone who has written a letter of recommendation before. Having already written a recommendation is not a prerequisite; knowing you well and being an advocate are. 
• Work related. While each school gives different guidance on whom to select, most schools are fine if you have a non-professional recommendation. This could be someone senior to you at a non-profit you are heavily involved in (though it should not be a college professor). 
• Different for each school. Nine times out of ten, we would suggest using the same two recommenders for all schools. You want to choose the people who, together, can form the best picture of you with the most solid endorsements. By choosing the two “best,” why would you want to muddy the waters by introducing the third or fourth best recommender? You may be worried about asking the same two people to write letters for multiple schools, but the work is mostly concentrated in that first letter, so the workload for two versus for letters is not much different. Also, the fewer recommenders you need to manage, the better.

Waiving your Rights

When you are asked in the online application if you are willing to waive the right to see your letters of recommendation, note the question has nothing to do with whether you see your letters before your recommenders submit them. Instead, you are being asked to waive the right to gain access from the school to your letters of recommendation (and note that you only have this right if you are accepted to and attend the school). So, unless you plan to one day ask the school if you can see your letters, you can confidently waive the right when answering this question.  

A Final Note: Do Not Write your Own Recommendation

This should go without saying, but we are saying it—emphatically. Do not write your own recommendation! If your recommender asks you to do so, decline—writing your own recommendation could disqualify your entire application! The schools invest in technology to evaluate authorship (IP addresses, vocabulary, etc.), so why risk your candidacy?