Sample MBA Recommendation Letters: 6 Examples That Work

Mid level: engagement manager recommending a consulting associate (284 words)

How does the applicant's performance compare to that of other well-qualified individuals in similar roles?

I have supervised Priya Desai for two years as her engagement manager at a strategy consulting firm, across four client projects. In that time I have managed about twenty associates, and I place Priya among the top two.

The clearest example came on a pricing project for a regional grocery chain. Our client had a week to decide whether to cut prices in a group of stores, and the data from their stores was incomplete. Priya did not wait for perfect data. She built a simple model from the stores that had clean numbers, told the client team exactly what the model could and could not say, and recommended a small test in a handful of stores before any wider change. The client ran the test, and the decision they made afterward was based on real results rather than our guess.

What separates Priya from strong peers is that she takes ownership of the client relationship early. Most associates wait to be invited into senior conversations. Priya asked to present the test design to the client's finance director herself, prepared for every question I could think of, and handled one I had not thought of with a calm "we don't know yet, and here is how we will find out."

She is also generous with junior colleagues. When two new analysts joined the project, she ran short evening sessions on our modeling standards without being asked, and both were contributing within a month.

Priya is ready for business school now, and I expect her to lead a team of her own soon after it. I recommend her without reservation.

Mid level: product director on feedback given to a product manager (232 words)

Describe the most important piece of constructive feedback you have given the applicant.

About a year into his role, I told Daniel Kim that he was making decisions too quickly in meetings and leaving his engineering partners behind. Daniel is fast and usually right, but in a planning session for our mobile checkout redesign he settled on a design before the engineering lead had finished explaining a performance risk. The team went along with it, and two weeks later we had to rework part of the build.

I raised it with him the next day in a one to one. I explained that his speed was a strength, but that when he closed a discussion early, people stopped bringing him problems. He did not argue. He asked me to point it out in the moment if it happened again, and he asked the engineering lead for the same favor.

Over the next quarter I watched him change how he ran meetings. He started ending each discussion by asking the quietest person in the room for their concerns, and he wrote decisions down with the open risks listed beside them. The engineering lead told me later that Daniel had become the product manager her team most wanted to work with.

What impressed me most was how quickly he acted on the feedback and how openly he asked others to hold him to it.

Entry level: nonprofit program director recommending a program coordinator (239 words)

I have supervised Maria Gonzalez for two and a half years as director of a youth employment nonprofit, where she started as a program coordinator straight out of college.

Compared with the coordinators I have hired over the past decade, Maria stands out for the way she turns a messy process into a simple one. When she joined, our summer job program matched teenagers to employers using spreadsheets that only one person understood. Maria interviewed the employers and the participants, mapped the steps on a whiteboard and proposed a shared tracking sheet with clear owners for each stage. She trained the whole team on it in an afternoon. The next summer, employers told us placement was the smoothest they had experienced with us.

She also handles hard conversations with maturity beyond her experience. When a long time employer partner complained that our participants were arriving unprepared, Maria visited the site, listened to the manager, and redesigned our orientation session with his input. That employer now hosts more of our participants than before.

Her growth area is delegation. She tends to take on too much herself, and I have encouraged her to let newer staff own parts of the work. She has started doing that, and I see her becoming a strong manager.

Maria has outgrown the role I can offer her, and I believe an MBA will prepare her to lead a larger organization. I recommend her with enthusiasm.

Senior level: former engineering manager recommending a senior engineer (218 words)

I managed Alex Chen for three years at an industrial automation company, where he worked as a mechanical engineer and later a senior engineer before he moved to his current employer.

Among the engineers I have supervised, Alex was the one I trusted with problems that crossed departments. When a customer reported repeated failures on one of our packaging lines, the issue sat between design, manufacturing and field service, and each group believed it belonged to another. Alex took the case, gathered failure reports from all three groups, and traced the cause to a supplier part that had changed without notice. He presented the evidence to the supplier and to our own leadership, and the fix he proposed was adopted across the product line.

He also built something lasting. Alex started a monthly lunch session where engineers presented a failure and what they learned from it. Attendance was voluntary, and it grew steadily until it became part of how our team onboarded new hires.

My one piece of advice to Alex was to speak up earlier in senior meetings, where he often held back an opinion until he had complete data. He took that seriously, and by the time he left he was presenting to our executive team with confidence.

I recommend Alex strongly for your MBA program.

Mid level: board member recommending a startup founder (207 words)

I have served on the advisory board of a small education software company founded by Samuel Okafor for the past three years. I meet with Samuel every month and review his plans, hiring decisions and financial reports.

Compared with the many founders I have advised, Samuel is unusually honest about bad news. In our second year, a large school district customer delayed its renewal, and the company faced a cash shortfall. Samuel called me the same day, laid out three options with the risks of each, and chose to cut his own salary and pause hiring rather than raise money on poor terms. He explained the decision openly to his team of eight, and none of them left.

He also listens. When I told him his product roadmap was trying to serve too many types of schools, he pushed back at first, then spent a month talking to customers and came back with a narrower plan. That focus helped him win the district back the following year.

Samuel's weakness is that he still does too much of the selling himself. He knows this, and I believe the MBA will give him the tools and the network to build a stronger team around him. I recommend him wholeheartedly.

Mid level: battalion commander recommending an Army captain (217 words)

I served as Captain Laura Mitchell's battalion commander for eighteen months, during which she led a logistics company of about one hundred soldiers responsible for supplying fuel, food and equipment to our battalion.

Among the twelve company commanders I have rated in my career, I rank Laura in the top two. During a large training exercise, a supply route was closed with little warning. Laura reorganized her convoys overnight, coordinated with two other units to share vehicles, and kept every unit supplied without a single missed delivery. She briefed me the next morning with a clear plan and the risks she was still watching.

She is equally strong with people. Laura took over a company with low morale after a difficult deployment. She met with every platoon, fixed a broken leave schedule that soldiers had complained about for months and recognized good work publicly. Within a few months, her company had the best readiness record in the battalion.

The feedback I gave her was to trust her lieutenants with more authority. She had a habit of checking every detail herself. She began giving her platoon leaders full ownership of their missions, and two of them have since been selected for demanding assignments.

Laura is an exceptional leader, and I recommend her to your MBA program without reservation.