MC1 I am content with my current salary and career earnings, which are competitive for my region, and I do not believe there is any issue with this.
MC2 (What I find surprising is that a recommendation letter from the co-founder, CEO, and co-founder of a Y-Combinator-backed company was not deemed sufficient. In his letter, he clearly outlined my contributions as an analyst, where I led the development of robust monitoring and evaluation solutions for a country expansion that allowed us to exceed company targets and surpass industry benchmarks. He also mentioned how I led an in-depth research on “Loan Disbursement Speed,” leading to an 11% reduction in loan processing time, benefiting over 2,000 businesses. To support these claims, I submitted documentation that included the monitoring solutions I developed, a company announcement, and detailed evidence of the reduction in loan processing times data that is clear and self-explanatory. It’s worth noting that the reference letters were concise but contained detailed data and documentation to back up every claim.
MC 3: The COO of a product-led company with over one million users also provided a recommendation letter. This letter highlighted my leadership in supply chain analytics across eight countries, where I developed a data tool that improved the fulfillment rate by 5%, resulting in 18,000 additional trips per year and an $84,000 increase in revenue. I also led research that justified fare adjustments, which the CEO announced and was covered by major media outlets in the country. Once again, I submitted documentation demonstrating the impact of this work to substantiate these achievements.
OC2
I contributed to three major industry reports widely circulated across the African sub-region between 2020 and 2022.
My Tableau Public profile showcases over 5,000 views across 14 uploaded projects, which are accessible for download and have been used by other professionals.
I am curious to know if the COO and CEO of such companies are regarded as industry leaders. I do not report to either of these two leaders! Is there merit here?
Hi @Ball the feedback is self-explanatory. Your MC is insufficient to show potential of leadership in the digital sector.
letters of support (even from CXOs) are insufficient evidence as per TN guidelines and so is salary proof.
if you have more evidence that meet the examples of evidence given under MC in the guidelines, then you should submit a fresh application adding those considering you have cleared optional criteria.
Thanks for this, @pahuja, but isn’t that going against their guideline when they mention that they want a letter from industry leaders and pay to show I am well compensated for my services? Two pieces of evidence are met there. What of the three publications I have under my OC2? Can I refer them to it? Is there a logical way around it without submitting a new application?
You can’t submit new evidence or move evidence around in an appeal.
The letters from leading industry figures are for the letters of recommendation.
For MC TN want evidence that they can verify - proof of speaking, articles about you in outside media etc. Except for your salary all other evidences in your MC are letters.
The guide clearly states that letters alone don’t suffice.
Note that the use of letters of reference alone to show how you meet any of the criteria is not sufficient, additional evidence should be provided.
I love this conversation, @hsafra. I could learn something here; I want others to be able to avoid the same trap. Yes, there is a letter of recommendation on page 1, backed by two other pages with quantifiable impact to back every word the industry leaders put in the letter. I quote, “You led the marketing or business development at a product-led digital technology company, demonstrably enabling substantial revenue and/or customer growth or major commercial success, as evidenced by reference letter(s) from leading industry expert(s) describing your work, senior global commercial executives inside the company and/or at company partners/customers, or similar evidence.” “Where possible, evidence should include supporting data such as the number of page views, downloads, or other quantifiable metrics.”
That’s possible as one piece of evidence, but letters can’t be all the evidence you provide. You need to have external evidence validating your claims and TN didn’t find it.
It looks like MC2 is a letter + self authored documents, and MC3 is a letter + media mentions that don’t include your name on them?
Could it be that it was not found, @hsafra? I used internal company data and quantifiable metrics to support all the statements made by the industry leaders, or they confused the letters with my other mandatory criteria. I submitted four letters to LOR + Two industry leaders’ letters of endorsement for MC, which are needed to demonstrate my leadership in growing a product-led company.
On top of the industry leaders letters:
I shared a comprehensive research document, including a screenshot of the first page out of 14, which details the various hypotheses I tested. I also included details about the monitoring solution and a video link. I highlighted the OKRs that were impacted and the subsequent effects after my changes were implemented, as well as the company data. All of these communications demonstrate my involvement in the project (Code, Slack Messages, and Accolades).
How I led the development of solid monitoring tools for our expansion project together with SOP tools shared a few examples of use cases, with my name showing that I developed it a year ago in the internal company repository together with innovative data pulses that have my name that go to various slack channels.
How I led supply analytics in over six countries and how I created a data web dashboard that eliminated the data wrangling process and improved the fulfillment rate by 5%. I shared a shoutout from my manager from Linkedin 2 years ago and conversations around it with snippets from the dashboard hosted on the company’s internal server and accessed through VPN in other countries. The quantifiable impact is $84,000 per year and 18,000 additional trips, as seen on my performance appraisal and as the chief operating officer mentioned.
Yes, the media does not mention my name; however, I was the one who led the research initiatives, as indicated in the letter, performance appraisal, and a screen grab of the research together with coming up with the pricing model country wide.
The tool we use internally is Redash, and it clearly shows my name for most of these claims and the date published together with the company URL!
I have an additional publication listed on my CV that I haven’t used. Can I ask them to reference it as well? I would really like to know exactly where I went wrong at this point so I can either submit an appeal or start over from scratch. My gut feeling is telling me the industry leader’s letter of recommendation was considered as my other additional MC letter of recommendation. Because the feedback only mentions my salary
@Ball your OC2 is met basis your OC2 evidence. MC is a harder criteria to meet and no they don’t go against their guideline as it’s mentioned in the guideline that letters and salary proof is accepted but not sufficient. Like @hsafra mentioned they need more verifiable evidence.
Example say I can get a letter of support from a top-notch CXO, and internal snapshots : however TN needs you to demonstrate potential in the entire sector in MC and letters/internal docs are not enough here.
Having said that, an appeal is free of cost and if you strongly feel you had enough external evidence in MC to prove expertise in industry (beyond support letters) then there’s no harm in appealing anyway.
This sounds self authored and company internal only. TN want MC evidence for a wider impact than solely your workplace.
I doubt an appeal will help but as @pahuja noted there’s no harm in submission one.
If you apply again try to use external evidence as much as you. The publications you mentioned that you didn’t use might fit though I don’t know what’s it about.
Thanks, @pahuja and @hsafra, for your help! I now have a better understanding and have filed an appeal to identify any weaknesses in my mandatory criteria, so I can strengthen my next application in case it gets rejected again. My next question is, if I apply for a new application in December, would reference letters from August still be valid? Considering that these professionals are very busy, I only want to reach out to them when necessary.
An ideal window for which the reference letters are 100% valid is 3 months.
If you have multiple recommendation letters, try to get the most critical/important 3 letters (the main ones) re-signed by the recommenders if you re-apply beyond 3 months.
TN sees all your evidences as a whole, so if there are like 2/6 letters which are old it’s fine, but you should aim to get max. of them re-signed if you apply beyond 3 months
Thank you all for your contributions @pahuja@cosmic.wilderness@hsafra , but unfortunately, the appeals were unsuccessful, as suggested in this thread. The key takeaway from this experience is that the MC cannot be passed without third-party validation. I wanted to share this lesson for the next person to learn from my experience. I will now close this thread and open a new one to keep it concise and retain its educational content.
