A big improvement has come to institutional structure in our ByCommittee platform! In light of recent conversations with institutions using the platform, we have expanded the available hierarchy to accommodate any number of administrative levels—making it possible for even institutions with more distinctive structures to benefit from academic committee support software.
Continue reading “Flexible hierarchy release in ByCommittee!”
Recently, an Interfolio user tweeted at us about the options we provide for gender in the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) questionnaires in ByCommittee, our platform for faculty hiring. Continue reading “Adding space for non-binary answers about gender”
Administering faculty searches across an institution can be daunting—not only do you have to consider the logistics of the search process itself, but you also have keep up with data about applicants and positions across your institution, in every division and department. We’ve heard from our administrative users that finding meaningful patterns that span the entire university can be really difficult, if not impossible.
But here’s some great news for our administrative users: we’ve just released a new feature in ByCommittee Faculty Search called Combined Reports that makes running reports simpler and more comprehensive than ever before. Now, administrators have the ability to run reports on all of the data involved in faculty hiring across their institution and can create custom reports based on filters such as position information, forms, and institutional unit.
If you’re an administrative user, you’ll find the new Combined Reports feature on the Reports page of ByCommittee Faculty Search. Once logged in, you’ll be able to draw upon data across departments and schools to run detailed reports about your institution, bringing together data that could previously only be accessed by running multiple reports or looking in various places. But the new feature isn’t just comprehensive, it’s also customizable. Combined Reports allows you to filter all of the information about faculty hiring at your university by category in order to obtain the exact results you need.
This type of flexible searching and reporting is based on the same technology you’d find on an online shopping website, like Amazon. Here’s a simple analogy: you’re online trying to buy a new laptop, and decide you want to see all laptops made by Toshiba that have at least 4 GB of ram and are priced between $200 and $300. In this example, selecting brand, ram, and price allows you to see products that meet all three criteria. We’ve created a similar experience with Combined Reports: administrators can create a report that spans their entire institution, but filters by unit (pulling everything in the College of Liberal Arts, for instance), position (all the English, History, and Philosophy positions for that year), degree of applicant (Ph.D. in hand, or just A.B.D.), and applicant response to customized questionnaires included in their application packet.
One of the most important and user-requested aspects of this feature is the ability to filter applications by applicant responses to custom forms (the self-built questionnaires administrators can create and add to an application). Combined Reports also includes the ability to filter by EEO data, as well. Administrators with access to EEO data will be able to use Combined Reports to gather lists of applicants who have given specific responses to EEO form questions.
And to be clear: nothing will change about who has access to data in ByCommittee; if you’ve set permissions, they’ll stay in place. The only change will be a more robust way to create reports across your institutional hiring processes.
There are lots of way to use Combined Reports, but our hope is that it is now much faster to discover and report on all of the information gathered over the course of your institution’s hiring process.
Usually “busy season” refers to the dreaded time of the year for tax professionals. Well, Interfolio deals with numbers too! During our busy season, when scholars are applying for jobs and we are helping them send and quality check their applications, those numbers can teeter off into the thousands. We see thousands of documents from scholars and send thousands of deliveries every day during this season.
It could be a dreaded time for us as well—if we failed to satisfy our customers. However, it’s the time of year that we are most proud of because the stakes and expectations are high—in fact, each year they are even higher than the year before. Each season we try to take things up a notch in customer service. We strategize throughout the year in preparation for a rush of adrenaline that is over before we realize it’s even begun. Everyone benefits from this adrenaline rush, especially our friends at Starbucks! The office atmosphere is that of jockeys in a horse race. Who will get the most deliveries processed? Who will meet their goals first in the office? Everyone is amped up on caffeine and geared up for the first of many pushes of the season. Happy and satisfied scholars are always our goal. To sum it all up: we take great pride in what we do! The atmosphere is highly competitive and busy, but we never fail to have a little fun during this time either. What a perfect reason to order pizza for the office, coffee for everyone, and snacks throughout the day! For me, the pleasure is being able to take the pressure off the scholar to meet deadlines, and presenting a perfect picture of them to their potential employers. It’s knowing that the headache of gathering paperwork, requesting information from various sources, and filling out applications falls on me and not them.
Busy season marks the time of year where scholars are putting their best foot forward in pursuit of their career. Interfolio understands how crucial this time is, and that’s what drives us to give our scholars our very best. While we effectively move your academic identity from one place to another, we also provide personalized scholar support over the phones and via email.
Aside from just providing great service to our scholars, busy season is also a time when we work even closer and harder as a team. Our teamwork is tested on so many levels, and in the process I find that I learn and appreciate my colleagues even more. There’s an unspoken motto we all live by at Interfolio. The motto is: we care—we do—because we know! We see ourselves as a network for scholars, and as friends. We do this work because many of us have been, or are currently, scholars ourselves, so we know what is expected during this time. As a result, we seek to fulfill those needs and expectations. So if you’re in our neighborhood during busy season, feel free to drop in and say hello, especially if you like pizza, too!
If you’ve submitted an application through Interfolio’s ByCommittee—that is, you’ve sent materials to an institution receiving applications through Interfolio, rather than another system for job postings—you probably noticed that there are quite a few steps involved in attaching your recommendation letters to your application. Maybe more steps than you first realized. Prior to today, a letter could only be attached if the letter writer had already sent their letter to Interfolio. So as soon as a letter arrived, you, the applicant, would have to log back in to our site to add it to the application.
Our goal is to make your application process as easy as possible, so we wanted to eliminate this extra step. Now you can finish up your application and submit when you’re ready, without having to wait on anyone else. We’ve been working for the last few months on giving scholars the ability to automatically attach incoming letters to an application, even if that letter hasn’t arrived when the application is submitted. We’ve finished testing and are ready to share this improvement with you!
Here’s how it works: You can request a new recommendation directly from your application, as you’re working on it, and that letter will automatically be added when it arrives. After you request the letter, you can continue with the rest of your application. Or, if you’ve already requested a letter prior to starting your application and you would like it to be included in the application once it arrives, you can go ahead and add that “pending” letter to the application, and, once again, the letter will automatically be added to your application when it arrives.
It’s kind of like pre-ordering a new book online. Even though it’s not available yet, you can go ahead and request it, and we’ll automatically send it for you as soon as it arrives!
So now you’ll be able to submit your application through Interfolio and rest assured that your part is done as soon as you’ve clicked that “Submit” button—even if your letter of recommendation hasn’t arrived yet. If you’ve indicated that you would like your letter included once it arrives, it will automatically be attached even if your letter writer submits it after the application deadline. This lets you convey your intention to apply to the school and indicate that you will be sending your letters, and we’ll take it from there!
As always, if you’ve got any questions about the auto-attach feature, don’t hesitate to be in touch with our Customer Support team: Max, Ethan, Kat (me!), Prisca, or Jane at (877) 997-8807.
Before the New Year, we published Part I of this series, an effort to make Interfolio’s role in the job application process more transparent. That post explained how we track application deliveries and the steps we’re taking to prevent spam filters from causing delivery issues.
If you represent an institution that has experienced spam issues with Interfolio email deliveries, please contact Max, our Customer Support Manager, directly: max.swagler@interfolio.com
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Today’s post addresses the evolution of a fragmented job market and why we, like many of you, are discontented with the status quo. The way the job market functions is inefficient and hard on candidates. We want to be part of the solution.
When we opened our doors in 1999, paper was the medium of the academic job market. Most institutions required hard copies of dossiers, a requirement that was laborious but relatively straightforward. As technology became increasingly consumer-friendly, university HR departments embraced applicant tracking portals and services. Universities that did not have their own, school-specific online application systems began accepting applications via email.
With these technological advances, the application process actually became more fragmented. The job market no longer demanded that you send reams of paper around the country, but it did demand that candidates and their letter writers deliver confidential documents and letters to myriad idiosyncratic online systems and administrative email accounts.
Interfolio began fulfilling email and web applications because job seekers, looking for the closest thing to a one-stop dossier shop, requested those services.
While we labor tirelessly to fulfill applications by web, email, and (yes, still) paper, we firmly believe that candidates and committees would be better served by a standardized platform and process for submitting academic job materials. There are ways to make life on the job market easier, and one of them is to adopt a common application platform—no more poorly designed university HR portals—that takes the cost of hiring off the candidate. Bonus points for eradicating the use of paper, an unnecessary waste of natural resources given the technology we have available.
For all of these reasons, we built ByCommittee, a platform that manages online dossier submission and review. ByCommittee is subscription-based: institutions pay for the service, and then departments can tailor it to meet their search needs. With a ByCommittee application, candidates upload their documents and search committees view them. That’s it: standardized, streamlined, and free for academic job seekers, the people who need it most.
Our goal is to make ByCommittee the standard application system for the job market. We hope that you, the candidate, will never again have to pay to apply for an academic job.
In the meantime, as Interfolio works for change, we will continue to ensure delivery of your applications by all four methods, including email. Perhaps just as importantly, our Customer Support team will continue to advocate for you throughout the job market process.
Have opinions? Find us on Twitter: @Interfolio
Transparency is in short supply when you’re on the academic job market. This series is part of our effort to make the application process more transparent for candidates. In this post, based on conversations with users and recent chatter on Twitter, we’d like to clarify how our email application deliveries work, explain how these deliveries occasionally fall short, and describe what we’re doing to prevent that problem.
There’s some confusion about where email deliveries fall within Interfolio’s spectrum of services, so let’s start there.
Interfolio delivers your dossier one of four ways:
The institution that is advertising for a new professor or postdoc or researcher determines the method—web, paper, email, or ByCommittee—by which Interfolio delivers your dossier.
We use a tool called Mandrill to monitor all outbound email communications. In the last 90 days, system emails had a deliverability rate of 99.6%.
That 0.4% represents both hard bounces (the email address does not exist, the domain does not exist, the recipient’s email server is blocking delivery) and soft bounces (the recipient’s mailbox is full, the recipient’s email server is down or offline). We know that there are sometimes delivery issues with these packets, and we actively monitor and address those issues immediately.
The majority of our email applications are delivered to institutions without any problems. A small number—less than 1%, according to our support requests—of email applications end up in spam folders. Spam filters, as anyone who sends and receives email knows, are silent; we don’t receive automated feedback about messages that end up marked as spam. We rely on users or institutions to notify us when an email delivery fails.
This of course is not ideal, and we are always iterating on our end to further limit the percentage of emails that get caught. In addition to our own settings, each Interfolio email delivery contains a verification link. We are reaching out to institutions to communicate the imperative of verifying receipt of email applications so that we can follow up on unverified deliveries.
If you represent an institution that has experienced spam issues with Interfolio email deliveries, please contact Max, our Customer Support Manager, directly: max.swagler@interfolio.com.
Interfolio’s Fulfillment Team verifies every email address before we OK it for sending. If we discover a typo or other mistake that prevents us from verifying the job search with which the address is associated, we do one of two things: correct the error ourselves if it’s obvious (i.e. a simple typo in the domain name), or notify the candidate and request a valid email address.
Our support team—Max, Ethan, Laurie, and Sydney—acts as a second layer of security for Interfolio members. We reach out to institutions when there’s a delivery problem. We expedite deliveries if you need them to go out before midnight for a last-minute deadline. We always re-send application materials free of charge if there is any delivery confusion. We work for you.
Interfolio support is here to help—we hope to make your application process a bit more transparent. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with feedback or additional questions.
Call our Support Team: toll-free (877) 997-8807
Whether you are applying to schools, preparing for the job market, or organizing your materials for the promotion and tenure process, you want a secure, easy to use service that allows you to manage your documents all in one place.
A “less is more” design means efficient task completion.
We know from our conversations with many of you that you specifically choose to use Interfolio because we provide you with the ability to do all of those things, as well as request letters of recommendation and create a public portfolio to share your work with the world.
Your specific needs challenged us to redesign our Dossier product to give it a simple, clean interface and—most importantly—make it easier for you to take action with your documents.
Calls to action became the primary focus of our redesign, and our user testing indicates that adding documents to your Dossier, requesting letters of recommendation, and creating new deliveries will get a lot easier for you after June 9th when the new version will be made live.
As you probably know, requesting letters of recommendation saves your letter writers from having to manage multiple letters and from manually uploading letters into numerous confusing application systems.
At the same time, your letter writers have told us they wish you could include more information with your requests for letters from them. The new version of our Dossier product allows you to provide their desired information with your letter request; you will be able to add a personal message, provide them with a link to program or job information, attach your CV and cover letter or writing sample, indicate whether or not a signature is required, and (finally) let them know if you are operating under a deadline by providing a “due date”.
Provide information to letter writers when making a request.
Delivering your documents safely and securely to the right place is easily one of the most important things we do for you. Our new design streamlines the delivery process regardless of delivery method, taking you step by step through the process, so you are confident your materials are on their way to the destination you have indicated.
Moving through the delivery steps is a breeze.
From the time you enter a paper or email delivery address, through adding documents, confirming delivery details, and (finally) checking out and seeing that success notification, we’ve built in help along the way.
If you are applying to a ByCommittee position, or a position for which we already have all of the delivery data stored for you (such as everything in the MLA Job Information List), you can skip right ahead to completing any specific application forms and submitted required documents.
Confirm your application details before delivery.
Supporting you and your academic pursuits continues to be our primary goal and that should shine through with the redesign of our Dossier product.
We have embedded help text throughout the new version of the product, so you get answers to your questions and tips on how to get the most out of Dossier when you’re right there in it.