MBA Recommendation Letters: What Committees Actually Read

Recommendation letters are the one part of an MBA application the candidate never gets to review — and admissions committees know it.

Committees read letters as an independent account, checking whether what a recommender describes matches what the candidate says about themselves. When those accounts diverge, the application loses credibility in a place the candidate can’t see and can’t correct.

Most applicants choose recommenders based on seniority or title. That logic is understandable and almost always wrong. A letter from a Managing Director who had limited visibility into your work will read as exactly that — credentialed, well-meaning, and generic. A letter from someone who watched you navigate something genuinely difficult carries weight precisely because it contains something only that person could have observed.

In this live YouTube session, Sia Admissions Founder Susan Berishaj will discuss how admissions committees actually read recommendation letters and why the decisions most candidates make in this part of the application tend to work against them in ways they never see.

• Why choosing the most senior recommender available is one of the most common ways a strong application quietly loses ground and what committees register when a letter comes from someone who didn’t know the candidate well
• What a recommendation letter communicates beyond its content — and why generic praise from a credentialed source often raises more questions than it answers
• Why the gap between a candidate’s self-presentation and a recommender’s account is one of the first things a committee notices and what it costs when those two pictures don’t hold together

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