Recommendation Letters — Evidence-Anchored References Written About a Candidate

The faculty task this skill owns is writing about someone else: the letter a professor sends to an admissions committee, a hiring chair, a tenure case, or a fellowship panel. It is the mirror image of alterlab-academic-career, which helps the candidate write their own CV and statements. Here the author is the recommender, the subject is a third party, and the failure mode is not modesty but fabrication — the warm letter full of superlatives that an evaluator cannot act on because nothing is anchored to evidence.

This skill turns a structured dossier (what the recommender actually knows) into a letter whose every strong claim is earned by a specific, checkable example, with specificity and register calibrated to the letter type.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when the request is to draft, revise, or evidence-check a letter written about a candidate by a recommender: