So what is the actual difference?
A recommendation letter is a signed testimonial in which a credible referee vouches for you and interprets what your work means; an evidence document is one of your own artefacts that proves a specific claim on its own terms. Tech Nation asks for both because they answer different questions. The letters answer "does a respected person in this field, who has seen the work, believe this individual is exceptional?" The evidence answers "is the underlying record true, and does it stand up when someone reads it cold?"
The structure matters for how you allocate material. You submit three recommendation letters and up to ten evidence documents, each evidence document up to three sides of A4. Importantly, the CV and the three letters sit outside that ten-document count — they are not competing for the same ten slots. You still need to satisfy the mandatory criterion plus at least two of the four optional criteria, and both the letters and the evidence contribute to showing that.
What goes in the three recommendation letters?
Each letter should be a senior referee's first-hand account of your impact, written in their own voice and grounded in work they have personally witnessed. A strong letter does a handful of things well: it establishes who the referee is and why their opinion carries weight, it explains their direct relationship to your work, and it describes — with specifics — what you did and why it mattered in the field, not just inside one company.
Good letter content includes: the referee's standing and seniority; how they know your work; concrete examples of your contribution described from their perspective; and their considered judgement on your calibre. The referee ideally sits at the right level of seniority and comes from a product-led digital technology organisation, because referees who are junior, or whose companies are not clearly product-led, are among the recurring reasons letters are marked down.
What does not belong in a letter: raw GitHub links, dashboard screenshots, tables of metrics, or long verbatim passages lifted from your personal statement. A letter is a human vouching for you. The moment it reads like a document you assembled yourself — bullet lists of links, generic praise, or text that mirrors your own narrative — it loses the one thing it is there to provide, which is an independent expert view.
What goes in the up-to-ten evidence documents?
The evidence documents are where the hard proof lives — the artefacts that back up every claim the letters and your personal statement make. This is the correct home for GitHub or repository links, pull-request histories, contribution graphs, product screenshots, analytics and metrics, press or media coverage, conference programmes, patents, contracts, salary or equity evidence, and anything else that demonstrates the specific optional criterion you are relying on.
Each document has room — up to three sides of A4 — so you can add a short caption that tells the assessor exactly what they are looking at, which criterion it supports, and where your individual contribution sits. That framing matters: achievements stated only at team level, without clear individual attribution, are a well-known reason evidence is judged insufficient. A screenshot of a dashboard is stronger when it is annotated to show the part you owned and the outcome you drove.
Because you have at most ten slots, curation is the skill. Ten precise, well-captioned artefacts that each map to a criterion beat twenty scattered ones. Watch recency, too: items should generally sit within the relevant recent window, and evidence pulled from outside it is a common technicality on which submissions stumble.
Why should GitHub links and metrics not go in the letters?
Because a letter loaded with your own links and screenshots stops reading as testimony and starts reading as something you wrote — which defeats its purpose. The assessor is looking to the letters for an independent signal of your standing; when a letter is padded with the same raw material that belongs in your evidence pack, it blurs the line and weakens both parts. It also crowds out what only the referee can offer: their judgement.
This is a judgement call rather than a hard rule, and it is one signal among several — a stray link in a letter will not, by itself, sink an application. But the pattern of vague, generic, or self-authored-sounding letters is cited by Tech Nation's own guidance as a primary reason endorsements are not granted. Keeping the proof in the evidence and the opinion in the letters is the cleanest way to avoid that pattern.
How do the letters and the evidence work together?
They corroborate each other: a strong letter makes a claim about your impact, and a well-chosen evidence document proves that same claim independently. The most persuasive submissions are internally consistent — a referee describes a launch you led, and the evidence pack contains the metrics, the press mention and the repository history that show it happened and that you drove it. When the two align without one merely repeating the other, the whole application reads as credible.
Getting that alignment right across three letters, ten documents, a CV and a personal statement is fiddly, and it is exactly where many otherwise-strong applicants lose marks on presentation rather than substance. If you would like a second pair of eyes before you commit, our £200 Fit Assessment reviews your material and tells you honestly where the letters and evidence are pulling their weight and where they are not.
Not sure your letters and evidence line up?
Get a written, scored Fit Assessment — credited to any package if you go on to work with us.
Frequently asked questions
A recommendation letter is a signed testimonial in which a senior referee vouches for you and interprets your work. An evidence document is one of your own artefacts — a metrics screenshot, a repository link, a press mention, a contract — that proves a specific claim. Letters give expert opinion; evidence supplies the underlying facts. The three letters sit outside the ten-document evidence count.
You need three recommendation letters and up to ten evidence documents, each evidence document up to three sides of A4. The CV and the three letters sit outside the ten-document count. You must satisfy the mandatory criterion plus at least two of the four optional criteria. Verify the current rules on GOV.UK.
It is better not to. GitHub links, screenshots and metrics belong in your evidence documents, where they can be assessed as proof. A referee should describe your impact in their own words and point to your work; stuffing raw links and dashboards into a letter makes it read like a document you wrote yourself, which is one of the recurring reasons letters are marked down.
It should not. Letters that are vague, generic, or that mirror the personal statement are cited by Tech Nation's own guidance as a primary reason endorsements are not granted. A strong letter adds the referee's independent, first-hand perspective on you, not a restatement of your own narrative.
Related reading: recommendation letters in depth, the ten evidence documents, the personal statement, endorsement criteria and the pain points hub.
Last updated: 6 July 2026. Facts on this page were verified against GOV.UK on 6 July 2026.