Letter Of Recommendation: How 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. Negotiating with your recommender to get him to print your letter on his organization’s letterhead and sign it can be tricky. How can you convince the person recommending you that you can write your letter of recommendation better than he can? Recommenders often lack writing skills, but they don’t often lack egos.
What’s more, we’ve all been taught that tooting our own horns is something we should avoid. What’s your recommender going to say if you asked him to sign a brag letter you wrote yourself? He may very well think you are a presumptuous jerk!
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. In lots of cases, it’s the second category that’s prevalent, but most people give the first excuse instead.
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.
Say something like this to your recommender:
“I know that you are probably too busy to write up a letter of recommendation for me, and I really wouldn’t bother you if it’s not very important. If you’d like, I can provide a draft for you to look at. I can email it to you if you want so it would be easy for you to edit. I promise, it won’t take up a lot of your time, and it could really be a wonderful help for me in my job search. Can I send it to you tomorrow?”
For more information, including tips, samples, and templates, please check out our website: Letter Of Recommendation
Posted on: Monday, January 12, 2009 at 2:58 am 
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