Shortly after becoming a full professor, I asked a colleague who had held that rank for years to name the greatest challenge she had faced in this ultimate chapter of faculty life. Her instant reply: writing recommendation letters.
She was exaggerating, but not by much. For the senior academic, drafting letters of support — for students and colleagues who are applying for admission, jobs, grants, and fellowships — is an increasingly time-consuming task, and harder and harder to get right.
In previous years, I’ve written about recommendation letters from the candidate’s point of view, offering advice on what to do if your references are “too fawning” or, alternately, so tepidly written as to constitute an “unrecommendation.” Here in the Admin 101 series, I’ll look at the flip side of the coin: how to interpret these letters if you are a hiring administrator or search-committee member. The good news: As in other aspects of modern academic leadership, there are workarounds, best practices, and smart tips to help you best use these often quixotic letters in making hiring decisions.
Judge the relevant qualifications of the letter writer. It’s typical to rank letters of reference by the prestige, status, or accomplishments of their authors, yet it’s also potentially problematic. No doubt those factors can and should be of some consequence. After all, it counts for something when a STEM postdoc, for example, has a recommendation letter from a Fields medalist, a National Academy member, or a $20-million federal-grant recipient.
As a hiring administrator, however, you need to bring some nuance to figuring out what truly constitutes repute. The weight you assign to each recommender’s credentials should be measured against factors most relevant to your program and institution, and to the position itself. Consider the following examples in which prestige might actually undermine a letter writer’s recommendation of a particular candidate:
- Big faculty names in any discipline may not have published regularly or recently in the latest areas of research and so might not be best qualified to know whether the junior scholar they are recommending will be the right hire in a newly emerging subfield.
- Likewise, the luminary signing the letter may not have worked closely with the person being recommended. The bigger the grants rock star, the larger the staff and lab crew, and the lower the odds that the professor knows the candidate well.
- A dean or other senior administrator, no matter how well-regarded, might not know the recommendee’s work as closely as someone who was a direct supervisor when the candidate was a teaching assistant or lab tech.
The point is that prestige does not necessarily reflect intimacy, insight, or applicability. In evaluating a new Ph.D.’s research potential in a hot developing field, you would find the most valuable information in a letter from an untenured assistant professor who worked daily with the candidate.
Moreover, somebody of stature at one type of institution might not be a discerning assessor of the ideal hire at other types of colleges. A department chair at a small liberal-arts college told me about a reference letter written by a leading researcher at a top-10 engineering program. His letter said all the right things but was quasi-delusional in regard to which of the candidate’s strengths would matter most for an opening at a small, teaching-oriented program where the labs were less well equipped and the budgets far smaller than those of a research institution. It would have been a great letter for a job at a big university but not for this opening at this place. More than to the candidate’s qualifications, the letter spoke fundamentally to the author’s inability to grasp the needs of an institution unlike his own.
In this series, David D. Perlmutter writes about pursuing a career in academic administration and about surviving and thriving as a leader – whether you are a chair, a dean, a provost, and or any of the positions in between and beyond.
How tailored is the letter for the candidate? Academics always urge new Ph.D.s to tailor their application materials — that is, to show how they fit the particular position, program, institution, and even location. Likewise, as a search-committee member or a hiring administrator, you should be reading recommendation letters to gauge their level of personal contouring. Are they generic, or do they seem customized to this candidate?
Quantitative specifics, unique traits, and qualitative examples are telltale signs of a customized letter. For example, a professor might write, “Giselle is one of our top students.” Well, what does that mean? Top 1 percent of all the students the recommender has ever advised? Top in everything: research, teaching, service, diversity and inclusion, work ethic, integrity, collegiality? Does the recommendation cite any specific metrics or achievements — extremely high teaching evaluations, a research prize, or some other quantitative evidence of the candidate’s distinction pertinent to your department’s or institution’s needs?
A tailored letter also includes anecdotes that show the candidate’s strengths. I once read a letter of reference that described a candidate (then a TA) as “excellent at collaborative work.” OK, good so far, but what made the recommender’s case were compelling examples: The candidate had initiated a successful grant proposal that involved cooperation across several doctoral programs and, when a professor fell suddenly ill, had quickly organized the other TAs to cover that week’s classes until the department could respond fully and formally. Those specifics illustrated how the candidate would be a collaborative faculty colleague.
Does the letter lose credibility by praising too much? Professors who are good at one activity — such as laboratory research — may be challenged in another area — such as project budgeting. It’s only natural to be skeptical of a reference letter that characterizes a candidate as superior in every metric.
Perhaps more than ever, the tendency in recommendation letters lately has been toward hyperbole. It’s easy to see why: Over the last several decades, the urge to overpraise candidates has grown as the number of full-time, tenure-track positions in many fields has declined. Likewise in administrative recruiting, the list of required qualifications keeps growing. Recommenders are feeling compelled to make candidates — whether for jobs as assistant professors or presidents — appear positively messianic.
Problem is: The more we play this game, the less trust we will have in the reference system. A recommender’s praise may be absolutely sincere, but it’s only of value in your hiring decisions if borne out with concrete evidence. In reading these letters, you have to look for details that show the praise is warranted.
I recall a friend in a social-science field chuckling about a letter that described a job candidate as “the greatest of all time” (the subject was a Ph.D. student, not Michael Jordan at peak career). I could relate: A reference recommending me for an administrative position once sent me a draft in which he had written, “David is the hardest-working person I know.” That praise didn’t seem credible or plausible — even to me — so I asked him to drop the line and instead to show my work ethic by citing some projects I’d completed.
Is the letter missing vital details? Sometimes what is left out of a letter is more significant than what’s in it. If you look at online forums and on social media where professors talk shop, you’ll see posts asking how to write a recommendation for a student who is good and likable but not without flaws or weaknesses in some crucial area. Generally the advice offered in such cases is to “accentuate the positive” — that is, write about what you can praise and omit anything you can’t.
From a hiring administrator’s point of view, this is knotty. Say, for example, that you are chair of a search committee at a major research university and are looking to hire a tenure-track assistant professor in a STEM field. You read a recommendation letter that focuses exclusively on a candidate’s potential for publication. However, the letter never mentions the candidate’s interest or achievements in applying for grants — yet grants potential was clearly a required and emphasized attribute in your job ad and position description. You have to wonder why such a vital component of modern success in the sciences goes unaddressed. It is hard to imagine that the letter writer could have overlooked it.
The letter of reference is not a beloved genre of academic writing. It can be painful for its author to execute, awkward and fretful for the job applicant to solicit, and confusing for the hiring department to interpret. Some critics have even called on academe to give up this tradition of hiring (“Is It Time to Eliminate Recommendation Letters?”).
Yet, as long as academe’s letter-writing tradition persists, all you can do is carefully and fairly weigh what a candidate’s recommenders say, and fail to say. As a hiring administrator, your job is to get the most you can out of any recommendation letter by sussing out its limitations, both human and technical.
