New! Resend requests for letters of recommendation

When you’re applying for academic jobs (many, many jobs with many, many letters of recommendation) it’s not wildly out of the realm of possibility that a letter writer might forget to fulfill a request. But, of course, that leaves you, the applicant, in a pickle: they’re busy, but you need the letter and you’ve already got a lot on your plate.

That’s why we’re really excited to announce that you can now resend recommendation requests! We wanted to give you more control over the process of requesting letters, the one aspect of the application process where you have to rely on someone other than yourself. In addition to making your life a little easier, the resend option also makes it easier for your letter writers to submit recommendations without spending time digging through their inboxes for letter request emails.

Up until now, if you wanted to re-ask your letter writer for a recommendation, you had to create an entirely new recommendation request. This would create duplicate pending requests in your Dossier, as well as in your letter writers’ accounts. Letters could also get uploaded to archived requests or to a request that wasn’t attached to your application. If you deleted your initial request to create another one, your letter writer would receive a cancellation notice—far from ideal and often very confusing.

Now when you sign into your Dossier and head over to your documents, you’ll see a “Resend” link next to your pending letter requests. Clicking on this link will provide you with the option to send another email to your recommender, or to download a cover sheet if your letter writer wants to mail the document to us. You’ll be able to see your recommender’s email address, so you’ll know exactly where your new request is going, as well as the last time you requested a letter, so you can keep track of your asks.

We know how important this process is for you, so we’re thrilled to be releasing this feature. We hope it will help save you time and energy, and help you focus on preparing for your opportunities.

If you have any questions at all about this new feature, please don’t hesitate to contact our Scholar Services team. We can be reached at 877-997-8807, or via email at help@interfolio.com. We’d love to hear from you!

New: Combined Reports feature in ByCommittee Faculty Search!

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.

New ByCommittee Template Feature and Agile Development

If you’re a ByCommittee Promotion & Tenure user and have been setting up new case after new case for reviews at your institution, then you’re in luck. We just made that process much simpler with the addition of easy-to-use templates for setting up future promotion, tenure, or review cases.

The ability to create a template is a nice upgrade for our users, but the process by which we designed the template also shows a bit about how we go about software development at Interfolio.

One of the strongest tenets of feature design we employ on the Interfolio Software Development Team is iterative development. When we create something for our users, we like to gather feedback and data, and then take a second crack at our idea (or sometimes even a third). This particular attitude towards feature development is part of an overall software development philosophy known as Agile Development. We put this attitude into practice with our newest ByCommittee Promotion & Tenure templates feature.

Our goal at Interfolio is to remove complications and friction points for users by providing a seamless workflow that is simple to start, conduct, and finish. We learned that one of the most difficult parts of conducting a committee-based review was the organization and coordination involved in starting the whole process. With ByCommittee P&T, administrators now have the ability to set up case templates to act as starting points from which they can begin the formal process for an individual candidate in the future. ByCommittee users set up case templates just like they would individual cases: templates contain much of the same information as a normal case, including material requirements and custom workflow features.

One issue we ran into early in development was that the process of creating a template was not distinct enough from creating a case. Our solution was to have the template creation look like a distinct workflow. After rigorous testing and analysis of user feedback, we decided that the second implementation was still a bit clunky. There was no easy way to manage case templates, and the language used in the feature was still a bit off. So, we took another pass at it. We went back and adjusted how users enter and exit the workflow, made significant revisions to the language that the user sees, and gave users a dedicated place to manage their list of case templates. Then, after more testing, we released the revised feature to our users.

So, while the first version of the templates feature didn’t quite meet our expectations of a finished product, we didn’t stop there. We set out to give users a way to plan out the logistics of conducting future promotion and tenure reviews, and we iterated on the work until the end product was a fully polished feature that will hopefully make our users lives a bit easier!

New Feature: Auto-Attach Letters of Recommendation

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.