Common Mistakes in a Recommendation Letter

April 29, 2011 - PRLog -- Imagine you are a senior manager of the sales department of your organization. You have a team of competent people working under you. One day one of your subordinates informs you that he is joining a new company. He requests you to write a recommendation letter for him as asked by his new employer. You have never written a recommendation before but you know that writing one is a daunting task. Now, what will you do?

Instead of telling you what to write, let us focus on things that you should NOT write. In other words, let’s look at the loopholes in a bad letter of recommendation.

Diplomatic words – A letter that does not vouch about the qualities of the employee or candidate is of no use to anyone. Recommendation is a positive act that means ‘refer to.’ Therefore, if you don’t write in favor of the person and instead take a neutral stand, the letter will damage more than do any good. Similarly, a bad recommendation letter will contain weaknesses of the candidate.

Unedited content – Attention-to-detail errors reflect your reluctance to proofread the letter. This shows how unwillingly you wrote the letter for the employee whom you are claiming to know very well. Alternatively, it puts a question mark on your credibility, which in turn, weakens your recommendation.

Absence of factual information or supporting references – The exclusion of important details, which proves your recommendation, will not convince the reader about the genuineness of the recommendation even if you write ten pages discussing the qualities of the person.

Delayed response – The letter that reaches the reader after the stipulated time is wastage of effort and is of no use.

Written for an employee not known to you – Letters written for employees you don’t know do not leave an impact on its reader. They easily reflect that the letter writer has not worked with the person and has little knowledge about the candidate’s credentials.  

Incomplete recommendation form –A reader rejects an incomplete recommendation form. If you feel that the particular section is not applicable to the candidate, mention ‘not applicable’ in the section instead of leaving it blank.

Written for a family member or friend – Such recommendations are considered biased and are of no help. It leaves a negative impression on the reader.

Recommendation letters are also written for proposing in-house promotions, transfers, salary hikes, or special benefits for a candidate.

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Tamanna is a passionate write of various topics. She is more fond of writing articles and poems on spiritual and motivational subjects.

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