Blog — employer reference letters

Why AI Recommendation Letters Get Rejected (And What Actually Works Instead)

Why AI Recommendation Letters Get Rejected (And What Actually Works Instead)

TL;DR

  • AI-generated recommendation letters have a "voice" — vague praise, repeated sentence structures, zero specific memories — and readers pick up on it fast, even without a detector.
  • Admissions committees and hiring managers read hundreds of these things a year. They know what a template sounds like.
  • Detection tools aren't even the main problem. The bigger issue is that generic letters just don't do the job a recommendation letter is supposed to do.
  • If you're going to use AI in the process, the fix isn't avoiding it entirely — it's making sure the final version doesn't read like a...