What do you think is the single factor that determines if your letter of recommendation will be read?
It’s simple, really: length.
People usually find long scripts to be tedious and boring, and they don’t really have time to labor over paragraphs, so if your letter is short, it has a better chance of getting read. You don’t just dive in and read laboriously over blocks of text without knowing for sure that what you’re about to read will interest you. The longer and denser the pages, the less likely you are to want to plow through it.
Of course, you’ll probably make time to read a novel if you really like the plot, that’s a different story. But if you are swimming in applications, how likely are you to snuggle up to a four-page letter of recommendation in an 8-point font?
Well, you might read some of it… if you are more conscientious than most, but how likely are you to be moved by the best selling point the candidate has going for her that is buried at the bottom of page three?
Get the point? All too many candidates take the vomit-it-all approach. They don’t know what the recipient is looking for, so they just inundate them with data, hoping that something somewhere makes an impression. This seldom works.
These people reviewing your letter or recommendation, they’re just humans. They don’t like plowing through tons of dense and mostly irrelevant material to see if you might mention one of the three things that they are looking for in a candidate. Not when they have hundreds of other candidates to look at.
In our so-called information age, we are all becoming swamped with data. Being able to summarize large amounts of data into a very concise but effective form, is a skill that most people should have in order to succeed in their fields. And this is usually what organizations look for in the people that they are looking to hire.
For more information, including tips, samples, and templates, please check out our website: Letter Of Recommendation
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