Not sure how many of the people who follow me here are academics, but if there's anyone who can talk to me about how they navigated writing two reference letters for very different students for the same academic job, I'd love to hear from you. Or even outside of academia, stories about how to provide a verbal reference for two employees for the same job would likely also be useful. Thanks!
(It's kind of shocking that I haven't had to do this until now in a multi-decade career, but here we are!)
I've been on the receiving end of letters written for candidates for the same position (albeit grad admissions which is somewhat different). Got angry when candidate 2 (&3) was also the best in 20 yrs. This aint ok!
I would have wanted the recommender to acknowledge, I'm writing letters for multiple people applying. I think they are all awesome. I don't know what you are looking for. Here is X's strengths and weaknesses.
Here is Y's strengths and weaknesses.
@MCDuncanLab @IPEdmonton it makes sense to me that qualitative evaluations would be especially useful in this context!
What do recommend people consider when they have to respond to the quantitative/multiple-choice-ranking sort of questions? It sounds like some kind of honesty (lack of exaggeration?) is valued, but answering anything other than like “among my top students” also feels super reductive and prone to bias.
