Creating a Digital Dossier

by Robyn Byrd

Applying to academic positions, whether temporary, post-doc, or tenure-track (might as well try for all of them right?), is an arduous process. Advisors tell us we have to be ready for it -- be done with your thesis before you're really done with school, because the job search is a full-time job itself. And if the time consuming reformatting, re-twisting and polishing up weren't enough, you have to keep track of a massive amount of information, documents, and letters of recommendation requiring a lot of lead time.

So what's a bedraggled thesis writer to do? Digital dossiers to the rescue! No, I don't mean the digital footprint of information and actions you've left on the internet during your lifetime...um, although that's something you want to be cleaning up right about now! I mean services that compile all of your academic application materials, organize and categorize them, and even deliver them to your universities of choice.

It's an amazing idea, and many online companies offer such services. Unfortunately, for those of us bound for academic jobs and alt-ac jobs requiring higher degrees, Interfolio seems to be the only service that specializes in handling our particular, er, problems. Perhaps this monopoly won't persist into the coming decades, but for now it may actually make it simple to store things online in one institution-recognized place. Some schools even require your uploads and info to come from Interfolio.

That being said, you may still have to directly upload some things to some institutions' application systems. Nevertheless, according to many of my recently hired faculty friends, having Interfolio was still worth it. The peace of mind and organization it brings to the application process is priceless. And the entry level package on the site is absolutely free.

So I took my colleagues' advice and started building my dossier on Interfolio. I still have to populate it with documents, but so far it seems pretty easy to use. I especially like that you can store letters of recommenation there, and see when they come in. They also offer job search tools, and they partner with Inside Higher Ed as well as organizations like MLA and APA, with links to those job lists. Interfolio may be a monopoly, but at least they're good at what they do.

Let us know if you use another service that is accepted by major institutions, or one that has really helped your job search! For now, I'm going to go get lost in the rabbit hole of the job search boards...