NUS Sample Letter of Recommendation
- How long have you known the applicant and in what capacity/context? (1000 Characters)
- In your opinion, what is the candidate’s leadership potential for the next five years? (1000 Characters)
Please provide three memorable achievements the applicant attained in your company. (1000 Characters)
- Kindly provide an instance when the applicant exhibited any one of the following qualities. (a) Entrepreneurship (b) Leadership (c) Exceptional work performance (1000 Characters)
- From what you understand of the applicant, what are his/her main motivations or interests in life? (1000 Characters)
NUS Sample Letter of Recommendation from Past Clients- 1
How long have you known the applicant and in what capacity/context? (1000 Characters)
I have known XXXX for more than three years. I was the Senior Content Manager at Byju’s and from 2019–2021, XXXX reported directly to me and participated in various projects during this period.In your opinion, what is the candidate’s leadership potential for the next five years? (1000 Characters)
XXXX’s problem-solving ability showcases his leadership potential.
During a crucial meeting, our team was tasked with creating a plan to release 50 videos on our learning platform in 2 months. We were only staffed to produce 30 videos, so we needed to increase our throughput. XXXX pitched an out-of-the-box idea to parallelize the most time-consuming task, which was converting questions into PowerPoint templates. He proposed using technology to automate the process, which reduced the time taken by 25%.
The solution was well received, and XXXX created a timeline and outlined how long it would take to complete each task. His innovative and organized approach helped us achieve our deadline, impressing me with his ability to understand problems, come up with solutions, and execute them effectively.
This is why I think XXXX has the potential to be a good project manager and successful business leader.Please provide three memorable achievements the applicant attained in your company. (1000 Characters)
XXXX’s most notable achievement is his work on monthly tests. He managed to deliver monthly tests to 350+ batches of 28,000 students with one of the best industry quality levels and received the Performer of the Month award as a result.
XXXX played a critical role in improving our live chat feature for students attending live classes. Through creative implementations, he was able to increase the average rating for this feature from 3.9 to 4.5. This was achieved through a thorough analysis of live chats with a team of 5 and the development of templatized answers for tutors, which greatly improved the time to reply and overall quality of doubt resolution.
XXXX has also proven to be an effective trainer, successfully recruiting and training multiple content developers across different job responsibilities, many of whom are now leading teams and managing different aspects of projects themselves.
Kindly provide an instance when the applicant exhibited any one of the following qualities. (a) Entrepreneurship (b) Leadership (c) Exceptional work performance (1000 Characters)
XXXX has always demonstrated good work performance in all the projects he has done. He is not afraid to express his ideas and to showcase them with confidence.
One such incident where XXXX displayed exceptional work performance was when he led a team of 20 people to upload 1,000 questions on ‘Byju’s the Learning App’ during the lockdown. He was given the opportunity to lead because he knew more about uploads than any of his peers.
The learning app had 48 chapters and we created a thousand new questions for each chapter. Each question was to be placed after the corresponding video within that chapter. XXXX drew up a plan of action. First, he plotted the details of all the chapters and videos. Then he conducted a meeting in which everyone was briefed on their responsibilities and given work assignments. He used an organized approach to help the team understand the process, allowing everyone else to work on it. The task was completed well ahead of time and at a high level of quality.From what you understand of the applicant, what are his/her main motivations or interests in life? (1000 Characters)
From my understanding, XXXX is a highly motivated individual with a deep passion for technology. As a tech enthusiast, he is always eager to stay updated on the latest developments in the industry and enjoys sharing his knowledge with others. This has been evident in his frequent discussions with the team, which has definitely benefited from his insights.
XXXX also has a strong interest in sports, particularly table tennis and chess. He has demonstrated this through his participation in these activities during his free time, and even went as far as organizing a table tennis tournament in the office to encourage others to join in. He is an active person who always finds a way to stay engaged and productive.
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NUS Sample Letter of Recommendation from Past Clients- 2
1. How long have you known the applicant and in what capacity?
I am Business Unit Lead at Nykaa and Simran (name changed) is an Associate Brand Manager in my team. I have worked with Simran for the past one year and within my team, she is responsible for e-commerce brand management of multiple beauty brands of the Unilever Portfolio.
During this one year, I have worked with her closely, and observed her interactions with internal teams, external stakeholders, and senior management. Amongst my team, she is the star performer.
I have worked with Simran for the past one year as her Business Unit Lead. She is responsible for e-commerce brand management of multiple beauty brands of the Unilever Portfolio. She is an integral part of my team and during this one year, I have worked with her closely and observed her interactions with internal teams, external stakeholders, and senior management. Amongst my team, she is the star performer.
2. In your opinion what is the candidate’s leadership potential in next 5 years?
I believe Simran (name changed) has a strong potential to be a team leader within the next 5 years. In my team, she has consistently displayed a bias for action and planned meticulously to deliver projects on time.
To quote an instance, last year, a skincare brand (under Simran’s portfolio) wanted to accelerate its growth and hit 1.5x revenue YoY. For this client, Simran built a comprehensive growth charter supported by category insights, market research on current trends, and competition benchmarking of global brands to adopt best practices. She led multiple stakeholders from brand development, shopper marketing, and key account management teams. She ensured everyone’s inputs were taken into consideration and their interests were aligned. In the end, she delivered a detailed implementation plan which helped the brand grow its revenue 1.9x, over-achieving its target.
I was thoroughly impressed by Simran’s work on this project and that is why I think she has great potential to be a leader in the next 5 years.
Simran has consistently displayed a bias for action. Simple, a skincare brand, wanted to accelerate its growth with a vision to clock 1.5x revenue. Simran built a comprehensive growth charter supported by category insights, market research on current trends, and competition benchmarking of global brands to adopt best practices. Multiple stakeholders such as the brand development, shopper marketing, and key account management teams were involved. With her relationship management capability, Simran ensured that the POVs of all stakeholders were taken into consideration and their interests were aligned. She made a detailed implementation plan and worked closely with multiple teams for seamless execution. As a result, the brand’s revenue grew by 1.9x, over-achieving its target.
In my view, 5 years down the line, with her ability to think through all perspectives, care for everyone’s interests, plan meticulously and take ownership, Simran will achieve success in leadership roles.
3. Please provide three memorable achievements the applicant attained in your company
New Brand Launch – Simran (name changed) launched a new brand Acne Squad where her category knowledge and insights were critical to the launch. The brand reworked its pricing-product mix based on Simran’s suggestions. All activities like negotiating budgets, optimizing spending to maximize impact, deploying marketing assets, and coordinating with multiple teams were led by Simran.
34% Growth in Portfolio – Simran unlocked significant growth for her portfolio with timely planning and meticulous deployment of a granular business plan. Every recommendation in her proposal was backed by data, and the execution of these was near flawless. As a result, her portfolio grew faster than the category average, with a share gain of 210 bps.
Certificate of Excellence Award – Simran never hesitates to take up a challenging task. In September ’22, she stepped up to handle incremental brands (covering for someone else) and managed two people’s worth of work, and still delivered impeccable quality. She was awarded by the CEO for her initiative and hard work.
4. Kindly provide an incidence where the applicant exhibited any one – 1) Entrepreneurship 2) Leadership 3) Exceptional Work Performance (FYHP)
A global personal care brand – “Find Your Happy Place”, was slated for launch on Nykaa in October. The peer who was leading it had to bow out due to a personal emergency weeks before the go-live date. Given that the launch timeline was sacrosanct, we needed someone to step in and take over the brand launch.
Despite having significant work on her plate, Simran (name changed) volunteered to take on the responsibility and jumped right in, understood the requirements, and worked diligently. In a short period of a few weeks, she managed to build strong relationships with brand partners and leveraged the same to proficiently manage inventory, deploy onsite display ads, and align offsite performance marketing and social media campaigns.
Simran demonstrated the organization-before-self approach, and given the time crunch, she was very entrepreneurial in her planning and decisiveness which helped deliver a successful brand launch and meet revenue targets.
5. From what you understand of the applicant, what are his/her motivations or interests in life?
I can ascertain that Simran (name changed) is intelligent and ambitious and yearns for growth. She goes that extra mile and takes on tasks beyond her job role solely to learn about other business aspects.
She is a great team player and actively contributes to team meetings, reviews, and discussions. Her points are well balanced, her having considered multiple POVs in her head. She is approachable and for fellow team members, she is usually the go-to person for help when needed.
Her passion lies in the world of beauty, and she is always on the lookout to keep herself updated on market trends – including beauty influencer connects, attending seminars, meeting industry experts, and reading up on the latest literature.
I strongly believe that the coursework and diverse peer group at NUS will equip Simran to build a successful career in marketing. Simran would bring to the classroom her values of inquisitiveness, perseverance, and collaboration.
She is a self-driven individual with the passion and aptitude to succeed.
NUS Sample Letter of Recommendation from Past Clients – 3
1. How long have you known the applicant and in what capacity/context?
I have known Akanksha for the past three and a half years. Akanksha joined Deloitte USI as a fresh graduate engineer. I was a trainer for the 2 months long on-boarding Bootcamp program for her batch of 80 fresh graduate engineers.
After Bootcamp, she joined me in my team on a project for Omnicare client where I was leading the Integrations track. I was her project lead for one and a half years for various projects.
2. In your opinion, what is the candidate’s leadership potential for the next five years?
Akanksha’s best quality that shows her leadership potential is her ability to take complete independent ownership of tasks.
The first instance where I noticed this was during the Cardinal Health Project. I was her immediate supervisor and we were facing serious trouble managing a high volume of defects in integration testing. Akanksha volunteered to manage the defects of our track and in 2 weeks (what could have been 6 weeks) she had streamlined the whole defect management system with all stakeholders on the same page and all open issues in closed status.
Due to her exceptional performance on the track, I recommended her to be the defect manager of the whole project for all 5 tracks. She efficiently handled the responsibility and because of her efficiency and quick turnaround time, overall project defects resolution time was reduced to one-fourth. Her commendable efforts were highly appreciated by the client and Deloitte partners for our seamless production.
3. Please provide three memorable achievements the applicant attained in your company.
Akanksha’s first outstanding performance was during her Bootcamp training in Deloitte. Because of her exceptional display of potential in the training, she was the only trainee handpicked out of a batch of 80 fresh recruits to join an urgent live project for National Oil Varco client even before the Bootcamp ended.
Second, in her short tenure of 2 years in my team, Akanksha wrote 3 internal eminence papers, which is a rare feat for someone with only 2 years of experience. She also led “Deloitte Do You Know Series” for employees to share relevant and unique content regarding their projects and latest technology trends.
The third achievement I remember is when Akanksha won the spot award for the Cambria project and our team won the project award for providing unique and robust solutions of a common error handler tool that automated the error-handling and analysis reporting of all applications in the project.
4. Kindly provide an instance when the applicant exhibited any one of the following qualities.
(a) Entrepreneurship (b)Leadership (c) Exceptional work performance
The Omnicare project was running behind schedule and budget due to manual errors in the code migration process. Akanksha proposed a solution to automate the code migration process which could remove the chances of manual errors and increase the team’s efficiency. The senior management really liked the idea and asked her if she would be willing to take this as an additional responsibility to design the application. She took the initiative and designed the application to automate the code migration process. The application performed flawlessly and was used during all Omnicare project’s code migrations.
Due to Akanksha’s exceptional initiative and technical expertise, our team established a fully automated code migration process that eliminated all manual migration errors. This helped the team meet the stipulated deadlines and budget. She also presented a paper on this solution at Deloitte Eminence meet from where the application was approved to be used in 3 service lines of Deloitte.
5. From what you understand of the applicant, what are his/her main motivations or interests in life?
Based on the long and close working relationship I have had with Akanksha, I have observed that she is a very keen learner and is always ready to explore new things in life. This is one factor why she has such great initiative-taking ability.
Akanksha always pulled the project team into multiple cultural and fun activities on the floor which did not let boredom and fatigue settle in the team and contributed to a positive atmosphere within the team.
She loves to travel and explore new places. She took advantage of every vacation to travel to new destinations and when back she always had her travel stories to share. She was always the go-to person to organize team outings and off-sites with her unique and refreshing ideas.
NUS Sample Letter of Recommendation from Past Clients – 4
1. How long have you known the applicant and in what capacity/context?
I have known Soumya since she joined the firm 2.5 years back as a Junior Analyst. I am the Director of Global Financial Institutions Centre of which Corporate and Investment Banking is a sub-team. I have direct visibility of her work in the team and have overseen her promotion to Analyst.
2. In your opinion, what is the candidate’s leadership potential for the next five years?
Soumya’s ability to be perceived as a leader has greatly improved since she joined the firm. She has shown superior communication skills and better temperament to handle unfamiliar or new challenges.
In the true spirit of a leader, she doesn’t shy away from taking team responsibilities such as training and mentoring fellow colleagues. She has lead business-unit wide training such as the Global Financial Institutions Centre (GFIC) Academy. She is also taking sub-unit level content and capability training for new joiners. Hence, she has been working on not only enhancing her skills but also of the team. Her ability and willingness to listen and understand the need of others is appreciated by all. She is able to handle working with people and efficiently work with them by recognizing their skills.
Hence, I believe, given the right guidance, coupled with her inherent capabilities, that Soumya can be a very effective leader in the future.
3. Please provide three memorable achievements the applicant attained in your company.
In her tenure of 2.5 years, Soumya has been a part of two high-impact external publications of McKinsey on the capital markets industry. She was a crucial member who helped define frameworks used in the publication and helped derive useful insights for a comprehensive analysis. She displayed efficacy in data collection and sound industry knowledge.
Further, we decided to present her the ‘McKinsey Research Leadership Award’ due to her strong research skills and ability to create opportunities even though she was a junior member. Given her good work, she was able to convert an offsite project for a publication to an invite onsite in Hong Kong.
Taking on additional team responsibilities, Soumya has also earned the reputation of an excellent coach for new joiners in the team early in her career. She is able to effectively train members on various content topics and databases, often also acting as an unofficial mentor.
4. Kindly provide an instance when the applicant exhibited any one of the the following qualities.
(a) Entrepreneurship (b) Leadership (c) Exceptional work performance
Soumya has clearly exhibited self- starter and entrepreneurial abilities, always seeking to expand the scope of her work to make tangible contributions to the team.
She took on the responsibility of process improvement and people development in the team. She realized the gap in the onboarding process and was quick in taking the lead to institutionalizing an ‘On-boarding and Training toolkit’. She collaborated with a team of 20+ professionals, identified key pain points, and created comprehensive material which is now extensively used for a smooth onboarding and transition into the team. New joiners now greatly benefit from this material which is a good primer for both content and capability building. I believe that this ability to recognize gaps and act swiftly will take Soumya very far as a leader.
5. From what you understand of the applicant, what are his/her main motivations or interests in life?
I have observed Soumya as someone who is not only dedicated to her core role but also doesn’t shy away from helping the team get knit together closely. She has been very enthusiastic about organizing various team events and outings. She remains motivated by her will to have a collaborative and open work environment. It is because of this that she brings a lot of positivity to the team.
Soumya has also held on to her interest in extra-curricular activities by performing at the various business unit level and center level events. We have seen her talent in dancing in the social section of the events of McKinsey such as Values Day, Family Day, and Knowledge Day. How she can manage tight deadlines along with being dedicated to participating in these events speaks to her multi-tasking abilities.
