For my third recommendation letter, the senior leaders from my previous firms cannot provide their recommendation letters in their current company letterheads since its against company policies to endorse non full time employees on their letterheads. They are ready to help me out in any other way - can I use a non letter head document or email for this?
Since the guidance from TN is to get the recommendation letters from established leaders in tech who’ve known your work for 12 months, I’m assuming that this automatically limits the endorser options to leaders of companies you’ve worked for in the past and there’s a high chance that these leaders are currently working in different big firms which would have policies against endorsing non full-time employees on their letterheads. I’m assuming this is a common case and would love to know how you’ve navigated this.
Another question: Is it better to provide navigation (reference to evidence documents) in the personal statement?
I can’t answer to the recommendation letter. However, do not put any form of navigation in your personal statement. It is 1000 words only, talk about YOU. If you want them to better understand your evidences, add a three page cover letter as part of your 10 evidences. I did that myself. I had a cover letter elaborating how each of my evidence meets the criteria and i also did well to include the names of the evidence. for instance document xyx is this that shows that etc.
Hi @Paul_Thomas
If it helps, one of my reco was no on letterhead but my recommender was fine adding the logo of his organization on the signature section at the end.
@happysoul Thanks. This is very helpful. I also feel that if the evidence part is strong, this slight deviation from guidelines wouldn’t matter too much as its a genuine use case considering the constraints listed in the guidelines.
As an alternative, let them docusign it (to validate the authenticity of the letters). You need to make sure that the letter is originating from them and not you as the logs of docusign is checked to validate this.
You can use reference from people you worked with who have left the company. They need to indicate how they’ve known you and their CV and LinkedIn profile will also show when they worked for that organisation.
Your personal statement can make reference to evidence you used in your application but you don’t have to cross-reference it. If you prefer, you can provide a cover letter that ties together your evidence but this will be counted as one of your 10 piece of evidence.
@May thanks for the helpful suggestions. Taking the docusigning route for the recommendation letter without a letterhead makes sense. While uploading the evidence, how long are the title or description fields for each doc? If that’s long enough I can avoid a separate doc for navigation and use that space for other evidence. Also if I’m adding a separate doc for navigating the evidence, should I upload it as the first piece of evidence for mandatory criteria?
I got a recommendation from a recommender at a FAANG and I couldn’t be provided with a letterhead too for the same reasons, I hope it doesn’t affect my application as I’m yet to hear from them. Did you use docusign? I didn’t make use of that.