A common misperception is that the MBA recommendation letter is only a complementary component of a business school application. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, your letters of recommendation for both online MBA and offline MBA programs can often be your strongest selling tool, if used carefully. If not used carefully, your application will quickly end up in the reject pile.
Managing what each recommender say about you in each MBA recommendation is critically important. For those who are already savvy about the business school application process, you know that applying to business school is really just a big, albeit challenging marketing exercise. However, like with any marketing exercise, the slightest inconsistency will ruin the credibility of your message. If you’ve been trying to hammer in a certain personal quality, say, your natural love for mentorship, but one of your recommenders says that one of your areas of improvement is being more patient with the team members working under you in high pressure situations, then how believable do you think the rest of your application will be in the eyes of the admissions committees? Not very.
The MBA recommendation is a very powerful sales tool. A tried and true technique of effective high-level salespeople (think partners and managing directors at investment banking and consulting firms) is having a 3rd party (e.g. a former client) provide a reference or a testimonial. Whenever you are trying to sell something to someone, having someone else tell your potential customer or client how good you are can be incredibly powerful. This shows that you are modest, but even more impressively, that you are so self-assured that you don’t even need to mention your credentials. With business school applications, you are trying to sell yourself to the admissions committees. Since it is so difficult to brag about yourself explicitly through your essays, why not have a 3rd party recommender do so for you? A strong, objective endorsement from someone else is infinitely more credible and effective than a self- endorsement. You should use the recommendation letters as a medium through which to unabashedly convey whatever you want to convey about yourself without fear of sounding arrogant.
The MBA recommendation is what I call the “super glue” that can give a business school application a whole lot of flair and punch. Your business school application is comprised of several different components, often a bit disconnected. Because recommendation letters are less tied to specific questions (unlike essays), a well-written reference letter can tie together your personal qualities, work experience, extra-curricular activities, personal and family background, career goals, academic background, etc. in a highly consistent way, and therefore be highly impactful. More importantly, a well-written recommendation that unifies your application will significantly raise the credibility of your application as a whole.
The MBA recommendation also serves to validate the achievements you make or at least claim to make (let’s not be shy here, beyond the unarguable facts, a lot of candidates exaggerate their applications). To be honest however, I do not believe that exaggeration by candidates makes the application process unfair by any means, because recommendations keep the process honest since they serve the important purpose of validating any claims one makes. If you exaggerate too much, you won’t be able to get your recommenders to validate your claims (you may even embarrass yourself). When your claims aren’t validated, your application will be less credible and hence much weaker relative to other applications where applicants have managed the recommendation process carefully and made sure that their recommenders validated all their biggest claims.
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