Tag: Interfolio’s Dossier

View blog posts about Interfolio’s Dossier online service for scholars to manage confidential letters of recommendation throughout their academic career.

Dossier user experience: homepage reimagined

Since 1999, Interfolio has helped hundreds of thousands of scholars:

  • Navigate stressful application processes
  • Request, store, and send confidential letters
  • Collect, curate, and prepare materials
  • Send materials or collections for feedback and mentorship (NEW in January 2018)
  • Guaranteed multi-faceted quality checks on all letters of recommendation (NEW in March 2018)

In July of 2017 we restructured our Dossier pricing model, introducing a free version, with the intent of enabling early-career scholars (as well as those seeking alternative academic professions) to prepare for grad school, a fellowship or their next career opportunity.

We have continued to evolve in 2018.

  • In January we added a new feature for Dossier Deliver users, sharing – the ability to share your collections or materials with anyone, anywhere.
  • Earlier this month, we guaranteed quality checks on all letters of recommendation after entering a Dossier Deliver user’s account.  

So, what’s new in the Dossier user experience?

There’s a new “home” page that serves as a dashboard for your Dossier.

We reimagined the Dossier homepage to now include several features and sections to better address your immediate needs and to display helpful and thoughtful content, relevant to you and your career development.

  • There’s a section at the top of your homepage dedicated to your Dossier activities.
  • A curated content area of your dashboard exists and includes four “cards” that feature help articles, announcements, and blog posts.
  • A new profile “card” in the upper right corner displays your name and the Dossier product you use.
  • We also created a new prompt when you first log into your Dossier. The purpose is to create a more personalized user experience – you’ll select which Interfolio account to access:
    • Your personal Dossier 
    • Your institutional account affiliated with a particular enterprise client institution (i.e. for Faculty Search, Faculty180, or Review, Promotion & Tenure)

As our users and the broader academic market have confirmed, an online Dossier must be personal, confidential, easy-to-use and encompass the entire scholarly lifecycle. Team Interfolio is committed to providing the best Dossier experience and welcome your thoughts on features and enhancements you’d like to see. Share your thoughts with us on Facebook or Twitter.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Feature spotlight: guaranteed quality check on all letters

[This post was updated March 2022]

Interfolio has been providing a platform for requesting, storing, and sending confidential letters of recommendation since 1999. In the past 20 years, we’ve learned a lot about our worldwide user base, including what they expect from us and what we could add on to our service to improve their experience.

That’s why we want to highlight one of our main (and most popular) features: for users with active Dossier Deliver subscriptions, we perform a quality check on all confidential letters of recommendation as soon as they enter your account.  Literally, we have a team of humans that take a look at the document quality of your letter, and then notify you AND your letter writer of any issues. That’s part of what you get with your Deliver subscription: not just the cost of delivery, but a group of folks who are making sure that your materials aren’t going to hold you back from that opportunity because of a letter error.

There are a variety of things we look for and flag as inconsistent with what a user expects within their letter, such as:

  • We check for a signature.
  • We make sure there’s an official letterhead.
  • We ensure the file uploaded is in fact a letter.
  • We verify the letter bears both your name and the letter writer’s name.
  • We establish the letter is legible.

Why is this important to you?

From January through December 2021, we quality checked over 127,000 confidential letters of recommendation.  We are pros at spotting potentialy critical issues like a missing signature or misspelled name.

We will perform a thorough quality check promptly when a letter is received in your account, guaranteed.

This allows for:

  • More time to fix/address errors
  • Assistance from Team Interfolio in communicating errors to your/a letter writer
  • Reassurance and confidence when your letters are ready to deliver
  • Exposure to positive and negative quality check results

How do we tell you what’s wrong? (or right)

  • If you are a Dossier Deliver user, we will send you an email if we discover any gaps in document quality (such as when a signature or letterhead is missing, or if the document uploaded is not really a letter).
  • If you are a letter writer that has mistakenly submitted an incorrect letter or a letter with issues, we will send you an email.
  • When you are logged into your Dossier Deliver account, and a letter has received our quality check, you will be able to see a bulleted list of what is right and what is wrong (if there are issues) with your letter.
  • If you are a Dossier Deliver user and your letter is error-free, you will receive an email letting you know it’s good to go.

What are the nitty-gritty details?

  • If you are a Dossier Deliver user, we will quality-check letters for you within 4 business days of their arrival in your account. 
  • Interfolio DOES NOT restrict you from using letters still “pending” a quality check.
  • Letters are also checked before being submitted for delivery.
  • Every time you request new letters Interfolio checks those letters for quality.
  • We will provide assistance communicating errors to Letter Writers.
  • Interfolio customer service does not check the content of the letter and therefore are unable to provide feedback on if/how you should use your letter.

Requesting and sending letters of recommendation is a stressful but necessary part of applying to many scholarly positions and other opportunities. Let Team Interfolio help you manage this portion of your to-do list, confidently.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Best practices: letters of recommendation for medical school

Interfolio has provided a platform for requesting, storing and sending letters of recommendation on behalf of pre-med, dental and other assorted undergrad studies since 1999. In the past 20+ years, we’ve learned a lot about our users, including what they expect from us and what we could add on to our service to make this process even simpler.

Below is a compiled list of best practices and informational resources related to the process of applying to medical school with a focus on letters of recommendation. Included are ways Interfolio’s Dossier Deliver subscription can be an irreplaceable component of the application process.

medical school letter of recommendation

When do I request my letters?

On average, we know it takes approximately 12 days from when a letter is requested to when it is uploaded by a letter writer into our system. This is of course a general timing guideline—if your letter writer is providing letters for more than just one student, this length of time can expand to multiple weeks or months. Identify who you want to write your letters by spring vacation (mid-March) and submit your requests to them all by the beginning of April. Per the Student Doctor Network, “This will give them at least 2 months to compose and submit your letters before your AMCAS submission.”

What goes into picking a letter writer?

Assume that your peers applying to med school also have high GPAs, MCAT scores and a thorough resume of extra-curricular and community-based activities. What sets you apart? Who you choose to provide a letter or support may make the difference between early admission or being chosen above other applicants. Do you have a professor, mentor, community leader or even someone in the medical field that can warmly vouch for you?

Based on an article on the Student Doctor Network, “Most medical schools will require at least 3 letters from professors of undergraduate classes: 2 science & 1 non-science.” Outside of letters related to courses you excelled in, it’s also a best practice to have letters related to extracurricular or community-based activities you were involved in. It’s best to shoot for 4-6 letters of rec that span all avenues of your work and personal achievements.

letters per account

How do I make the request?

At this point you have identified your 4-6 letter writers and now need to approach them with your request.

  • Assuming you know the person well and have a good relationship, ask them in person.
  • If you can’t ask them in person, send a well-outlined email including all the details of why you want them to write you a letter, what specific attributes you hope they include, as well as timing of when you need the letter.
  • Use Interfolio to request your letter.
    • Create your free Dossier account
    • Collect letters into your account by requesting recommendations
    • Your letter writer will receive an email from Interfolio asking them to submit your letter to your account
    • You will be notified once the letter has reached your account

How do I submit my confidential letters?

To keep a letter confidential and ensure it’s approved by AMCAS or another receiver, you should have your letters submitted one of 3 ways:

  1. Directly to your school
  2. Via AMCAS or a related health profession’s delivery service
  3. Interfolio’s Dossier Deliver

If your institution’s pre-medical advising office provides a letter of evaluation service, you may be able to arrange to have all of your letters transmitted to AMCAS through that office. If you choose to use Interfolio you will receive with your account subscription:

  • A lifelong place to request and store your letters
  • A quality control check on all letters as they are scheduled for delivery including:
    • Checking for a signature and official letterhead—so that you don’t risk the letter getting rejected by the schools where you’re applying.
    • Making sure the file uploaded is in fact a letter
    • Making sure the letter bears both your name and the letter writer’s name
    • Making sure the letter is legible
  • Guaranteed letter content confidentiality for your letter writer, and for you
  • A customer service team ready to field all your questions

Whatever avenue you choose to deliver your letters, be aware of timing for the rest of your application and other related deadlines.

Contact us

Resources

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Medical Career

The evolution of Dossier Institution

Looking for technical instructions on how to use your Dossier? See these help articles.

Among vendors of higher education technology that address faculty data challenges—like faculty activity reporting, academic workflow, and academic portfolios—the Dossier is perhaps Interfolio’s most distinctive asset. It’s a private, lifelong online space for career development that belongs to each individual scholar.

Throughout 2017, having done much research across higher education to understand how individual faculty interact with their schools’ faculty personnel processes, we steadily added a series of special features to connect Dossier with our enterprise faculty technology suite for institutions of higher education.

Today, we call that bundle of special features Dossier Institution—the faculty member’s dedicated space to organize their materials and faculty data, with useful integrations into Interfolio at their school.

Here, we’ll:

  1. Summarize the origins and growth of Dossier Institution to date.
  2. Look at today’s feature release, the first of 2018: the ability for a scholar to share their materials and get line-by-line comments for feedback and mentoring purposes.
  3. Muse about the Dossier’s increasingly central role in faculty information management.

If you are seeking technical instructions for using your Dossier, you might want to take a look at these articles.

Origins: the value of academic portfolio software at the enterprise level

First introduced in 1999, the consumer version of Dossier is Interfolio’s widely adopted academic portfolio product for scholars on the job market, most commonly used to manage confidential letters.

When we launched Interfolio Faculty Search in 2012, Dossier served as the point of entry for job applicants, and in 2014, it was an obvious companion for those going up for faculty reviews through Interfolio Review, Promotion & Tenure. And (sneak peek!) Dossier Institution may just be the natural solution to a fundamental obstacle in faculty activity reporting: giving professors a compelling reason to maintain current faculty data.

To begin with, Interfolio focused primarily on the problem of faculty candidate preparation for academic reviews—such as tenure, promotion, annual review, or reappointment. As many in higher education had already mused, how could smart technology simplify and shorten the process of compiling your accomplishments?

Introducing institutional guidelines

Our first major product development in this direction (about a year ago) was the institutional guidelines feature. With institutional guidelines via Dossier Institution:

  • Institutions using Interfolio Review, Promotion & Tenure gained a way to more clearly communicate to their faculty the official requirements for what candidates must submit for certain kinds of reviews (an important consideration).
  • Faculty members anticipating future reviews gained a new sign of transparency and consistency from their employer about expectations for success.

Reuse past packet materials

Continuing to think about the experience of faculty candidates going up for review, our next development choice was to eliminate redundant work for faculty around repeated, routine reviews from year to year. We added the ability for faculty to freely import materials from any of their past Interfolio Review, Promotion & Tenure packets when assembling a new packet for a current or upcoming review.

Whether you think of this as an addition to the enterprise module or an investment in the capacity of the Dossier, the ability to reuse past packets served two known goals that institutions had clearly, repeatedly voiced to Interfolio:

  • It’s an efficiency and preparation tool for the faculty candidate, helping them put their best foot forward by eliminating hours of redundant re-assembly work from year to year.
  • It’s a transparency mechanism for the institution, facilitating a fair consideration of the candidate’s progress because they can attach the exact correspondence they received in past academic reviews.

Linking institutional guidelines with collections

Some time after we’d rolled out the institutional guidelines feature, we took advantage of the existing collections feature to provide another boon to faculty candidates: the ability to directly create a collection in their Dossier based on a particular set of institutional guidelines (for example, based on the tenure guidelines for the College of Arts & Sciences). It helps faculty make effective use of their Dossier as a staging ground to assemble or curate their materials in advance of known future reviews.

For example, if I’ve just started in a tenure-track history position, I can pull up the history department’s tenure guidelines in my online Dossier and, with a click, create a new collection in my Dossier that maps directly onto the stated requirements for my tenure packet—several years from now. And then, when the time comes to initiate my official case through Interfolio, I can import that collection straight over to my Interfolio tenure packet.

Sharing for feedback and mentoring (NEW)

And just today, we expanded Dossier Institution in another major way: by introducing sharing of materials and collections in Dossier.

Starting today, any faculty member with Dossier Institution can share individual files and collections of materials stored in their Dossier with other individuals at their school, and can enable those individuals to make line-by-line comments on documents. (We have also included a version of this feature in Dossier Deliver, the premium consumer package for scholars on the job market.)

The new Dossier sharing feature gives faculty a way to collect feedback on academic materials from others at their institution—including documentation of research, creative production, teaching, or service—without leaving the Interfolio environment where their work is stored. And it accommodates ongoing input on academic case materials, whether outside of an formal institutional workflow or as part of one, such as in the case of a mentoring letter.

The sharing feature is a significant step forward for Dossier, and we are interested to learn about its use among our client institutions. As usual, our product team has already conducted extensive research to understand a variety of real-world scenarios where scholars seek feedback on their work. The result is a flexible feature that accommodates a variety of collaborative needs.

Do you have Dossier Institution, and want to see what sharing looks like? Go ahead: sign into your Dossier, open up any document, and select “Share.”

Further developments for Dossier Institution in 2018

As mentioned earlier, we foresee Dossier Institution playing an increasingly central role in the long-term success of the Interfolio faculty information system at colleges and universities. When faculty benefit from new technologies and services, their institution benefits as well.

One major avenue of exploration is how the Dossier could serve, in a responsible way, as the avenue for ordinary faculty data collection at client institutions. This is a major hurdle in faculty activity reporting—so finding smooth ways to build routine data management into moments when faculty access their academic portfolio should be a win-win. 

Dossier Institution User Help Articles:

Infographic: Dossier and the Academic Job Market

How can applicants on the academic jobs market make their job search easier?

Based on some primary research Interfolio’s done to understand our Dossier users’ experiences in their search for academic jobs, we’ve highlighted some key things we learned in an infographic, “Dossier and the Academic Job Market.” The insights generated by this market research helped to inform the July 2017 launch of free Dossier and Dossier Deliver, as well as other investments we’ve made in the Dossier product in the past year. The survey results suggest an academic jobs marketplace in which highly qualified applicants are burdened by laborious and confusing application processes. Take a look below! (Viewing on mobile? Tap on the image for better quality.)

Infographic - Dossier and the Academic Job Market - Interfolio

Interfolio’s Dossier gives scholars an easy way to collect, curate, and send their materials anywhere in application to academic jobs, electronically or by mail, with a few clicks. Learn more about Dossier here, or upgrade from free Dossier to Dossier Deliver here.

Ask a candidate: where to look for faculty jobs

This is one of a series of infrequent posts by a onetime faculty job seeker, now academic-at-large, on the job market.

You know how to pull your materials together when assembling your applications for faculty jobs. You have strong relationships with colleagues or mentors who can write confidential recommendation letters (and maybe you have them stored online). But how do you find the jobs that are the right fit for your carefully curated set of documents? Don’t rely on one or two websites to surface job ads—cast your net wide with these options.

  • H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online is a massive old-school (archived content goes back to 1994!) organization of interest-group networks, offering newsletters, reviews of new books, teaching materials, and bibliographies. The H-Net Job Guide is the essential database of academic jobs in the humanities and social sciences in the United States. This database is free to the user, and you can register to have new jobs in the categories of your interest sent to you via email when they post.
  • HigherEdJobs is another job site that (like ChronicleVitae) runs ads for administrators and executive positions, as well as faculty jobs, and includes positions in STEM as well as in the liberal arts and social sciences. That means that they have a very large database of job openings (though, of course, many of them may not be in your field!) The HigherEdJobs search page allows you to select for jobs that have marked diversity and inclusion as a particular goal in their hiring.
  • The two-body or “dual career” problem can be a dealbreaker (for your career, or your relationship), so it makes sense to use any advantage you can get to solve it. Inside Higher Ed, which offers compensation data and career advice in its Careers section along with a jobs database, has a nifty Dual Career Search tool, letting you trawl the database for two faculty jobs spaced at a distance you’ll select.
  • The Academic Jobs Wiki can be a can of worms, since that’s where you go to find out (via anonymous user postings) how job searches are proceeding. That can be a recipe for bad feelings when you find out on the Internet that you weren’t picked to advance to the next round. But it’s worth braving the wiki periodically, for the following reason: it’s a targeted, crowd-sourced collection of jobs, aggregated by people in your particular field. The chances that a good job will slip through the fingers of all of those peers is low.
  • The Higher Education Recruitment Consortium is a group of institutions that banded together to help each other recruit diverse candidates for faculty and staff jobs.Since, as HERC’s website points out, female academics are especially hindered by the two-body problem, it makes sense that an organization interested in advancing diversity would invest in solving that problem. So, like Inside Higher Ed, HERC offers a special tool to use to help couples find jobs near each other. 

Depending on your field, and the year, the academic job search can be tough. But at the very least, the Internet makes finding every possibility easier.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, and send materials anywhere, including confidential recommendation letters, in application to faculty jobs. Learn more about Dossier here.

Ask a candidate: how to request a recommendation letter without being annoying

This is one of a series of infrequent posts by a onetime faculty job seeker, now academic-at-large, on the job market.

You can procrastinate while writing seminar papers (coffee), putting together conference presentations (but don’t count on that plane wifi—take it from us), or completing group projects (just don’t ruin any friendships in the process). But try not to procrastinate when it comes to one grad school task: asking faculty members for recommendation letters. These are the relationships you can’t afford to mess up.

Ask for recommendation letters early

So, ask in a timely manner: as soon as you’ve decided to apply, or at least a month or two before the deadline. In your admirably early email, make sure to include a link to the description of the opportunity (job or fellowship or grant) you’re applying for. To that email, or in a follow-up sent well before the deadline, attach as many relevant documents as you can provide. The writer should see what kind of a case you’ll be making to your potential employers—or to funding bodies, in the case of grants and fellowships. You could show your recommenders drafts of a cover letter, project statement, or teaching statement, all of which would give them a sense of which qualities to emphasize in their own letters. (Some kind faculty members will also help you edit these drafts, if you produce them far enough ahead of time.)

Consider your writers

Ask the right people—the faculty members who know your work the most intimately. If you aren’t quite sure whether your target recommender knows you quite well enough, everything we just said about providing context counts double.

Also, supply the writer with as much information as you can: the year you took the seminar; the gist of your final paper; the subject of the in-class presentation you did. Don’t assume this borderline recommender will recall your brilliant seminar comments in a class you took two years ago, or the work you did for a departmental committee your first year in your program. If it’s appropriate, attach copies of the writing you did that the professor really liked, and follow up by describing how that work fit into projects you’ve done since the class concluded (“I took this research I did for your class and turned it into a journal article on Helen Hunt Jackson; here’s a copy of that article”). That’ll help the professor get a full picture of your evolution as a scholar.

Provide deadlines

If you’re asking a recommender you know well to write recommendation letters for a wide array of jobs during your faculty job search, create a spreadsheet for them to access, with all of the relevant information for each job: contact info, deadline, a link to the job ad. Arrange the rows in order of deadline.

Remind your letter writers

And now that your recommenders have all the information they need, with plenty of time to put it to use, don’t forget to remind them to write. You can ask them when they’d like to be nudged, or you can take matters into your own hands and send a reminder ten days or a week before the deadline arrives.

Keep in mind, some of your recommenders may be writing recommendation letters for you for years in a row, and will then become trusted colleagues in your home field. In this situation, a little professionalism goes a long way.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, and send their materials anywhere—including storing reusable recommendation letters, kept confidential from the requester—in application to faculty jobs and other academic opportunities. Learn more about Dossier here.

WEBINAR | Tips and Tricks for Using Interfolio’s Dossier | Highlights and Selected Q&A

Earlier this month, we hosted a free webinar and Q&A giving some tips and tricks—around recommendation letters, deliveries, and more—for academics to get the most out of Interfolio’s free Dossier and Dossier Deliver.

We decided to hold this webinar to answer some common questions we were getting from users, and to share some of what we’ve learned about the folks using our products. The webinar also features an exclusive Q&A session that draws upon our attendees’ submitted questions to ensure some of the most common questions are addressed. 

Opening with some of the background and research underlying Dossier from product director Erin Mayhood, the webinar covers several of the product’s common real-life applications. It sheds light on best practices surrounding the three core areas of the Dossier account:

  • Materials
  • Letters
  • Deliveries

Robin Price of Interfolio’s Scholar Services team leads the audience through each of these three Dossier account areas in turn and deftly outlines the ins and outs of the different sections—addressing many specific questions about confidential letters of recommendation. We know that requesting a letter of recommendation, or providing one, can be a delicate and sometimes stressful process when deadlines are involved, so we offer features and a support team to make those logistics simple.

Here are a few of the most common questions we got before and during the webinar, and a quick recap of what our audience learned:

Q: Is there a way to store a confidential “generic” letter without sending it right away? I plan to apply for many positions, and I don’t want to make my letter writers send all the different letters one by one.

A: Yes! That is a very common use for Dossier, and you can do it for free. You can either request a general letter, or specify which opportunity the letter is for. Just use Dossier’s standard “Request Recommendation” feature—look for the “Recommendation Type” section in the request form.

Q: When requesting a letter of recommendation through Interfolio, how should I use the due date feature? Can a letter writer still upload a recommendation letter after the due date has passed?

A: In Dossier, the due date feature is not technically binding—it is just a tool (attached to the request itself) for you to communicate to your letter writer the date by which they should submit their letter. If you set a due date, it will not prevent them from uploading their letter afterward.

Q: Can I delete everything stored in my Dossier? 

A: You can delete any materials stored in your Dossier that you’ve never sent anywhere. You cannot delete anything that you have included in an application or delivery—but you can move any document (whether previously sent or not) into your archive. Archiving a document removes it from your view, so that it doesn’t clutter up your account when you’re assembling new deliveries.

Q: What type of deliveries are available through Dossier Deliver?

A: If you have a Dossier Deliver subscription, you can get your application materials (including letters, CVs, publications, images, and more) delivered to almost any destination via one of three methods:

  • You can provide us with an email address, and we’ll send your materials there, arranged in the order you specified.
  • You can provide us with a mailing address, and we’ll print out your materials and mail them, arranged in the order you specified, either First Class Mail or at an expedited service level.
  • If you’re applying somewhere that requires a confidential letter upload into their own online application system, we can substitute for your letter writers, and directly upload the letters stored in your Dossier. We only do this for letters, not other materials.

Finally, please note that anyone can use the free version of Dossier to apply to positions hosted entirely through Interfolio.

So, what can you do if you have questions about your Dossier account or creating one?

  • Watch the webinar. It’s quick (only about 30 minutes) and covers a LOT of information.
  • Check out the FAQ section of our site for quick tips and tricks on how to navigate Dossier and Dossier Deliver.
  • Reach out to us. We’re people that thrive on serving our customers.