There are a few things applicants can do to make the life of an external reviewer much easier so that they can better support strong applications. These things also help the internal promotion and tenure committee. Max Liboiron created the following (partial, but growing!) list based on reviews they’ve done:

• Be explicit about what you’re applying for. Do not assume your university will send external reviewers the documents they need to understand your application. In your intro/cover letter, note the position you’re applying for and whether there are specific tracks/positions. E.g. clinical professor vs research librarian vs research track… Some places can also split promotion and tenure as two different applications. Are you applying for both?
• Format your documents for readability. This can be as simple as using spacing instead of jamming things in there, but you can also bold important parts and use subheadings.
• CV: Bold your name in author lists in publications. This is so someone reviewing your work can easily see where you fall in author order.
• CV: Do not, under any circumstances, fudge what peer-reviewed means. Peer-reviewed ONLY means articles that have undergone review by one to three accredited experts in an accredited journal, not including a staff member of the journal like the editor. If you claim otherwise, it can become a case of academic misconduct (fraud). Book chapters are rarely peer-reviewed. Blog posts are not peer-reviewed. An invited article in Nature that is only reviewed by the editor, not matter how many edits they request, is not peer-reviewed even if it’s still fancy.
• CV: List your articles and book chapters separately. Peer reviewed articles and monographs are the most important by a large margin. Chapters are much less important. Do not squish your publication types together.
• CV: List the amount of your grants and the funder. How much did you receive from a funder? If you received a transfer from a larger grant, list both the full grant amount and the amount you received. List the funder, including the funding stream and the funding body, and expand any acronyms. This is particularly important for marking internal (your university) and external (outside your university) grants. If you are a co-applicant on a grant and some of the funding came directly to you as a sub-grant or transfer, list that amount as well. Otherwise, reviewers assume you were not personally funded.
• CV: List collaborator disciplines on grants. If you have co-applicants or collaborators on a grant, list their disciplines in brackets. It lets reviewers make a case for interdisciplinarity.
• CV: Use subheadings for types of talks. Separate keynotes from invited presentations from juried presentations from community presentations. They are fundamentally different. Be a gem and number them. That way I can say something like, “they have double the number of community presentations to all other presentations combined, which shows….”
• CV: Flag student co-authors. Usually people underline student authors in their co-author list. But whatever you do to tag them, provide a key in that section of your CV. I once read a CV that had asterisks next to several names. I didn’t know what the asterisks meant though.
• CV: For guest lectures, include the university as well as the course. We can’t know it was your home university if you don’t tell us.
• CV: Note whether presentations are invited or juried. Juried presentations are peer-reviewed, while invited ones show a reputation. Keynotes are different than guest lectures. Be sure to note the genre or presentation, not just its title and location. If you’re invited to a non-academic place to give a talk, that’s still a talk! Don’t demote community or professional presentations to service. They are presentations!
• CV: Explain anchor or last author status. Different disciplines have different norms for what it means to be the last author. If you are the last author, add a note if that means something, like being an anchor author or mentor author. Otherwise, it looks like failure and I have nothing to narrate it differently.
• CV: Do not use acronyms. Do you know who NCP is? NSERC? UKRI? The ESR committee? Being a TL Chair? Write out the full title of your funders, committees, positions, etc. in your CV and ideally in your written narrative.
• CV: Identify your mentorship roles. Use different headings for students that you co-supervise, supervise, or for whom you serve on their committee or as an external for a dissertation. Do not group them together, since supervision is worth more than serving on a committee. Also separate out master’s from PhD students from Postdocs.
• CV: Make sure your CV headings stay with your content. Often a page cuts between the heading and the content and I lose the thread. Keep it tidy.
• CV: Make sure your CV and narrative numbers match. Your amount of funding, number of mentees, number of publications, should be identical in your narrative and your CV. If you’re pulling something out in your narrative (like external grants rather than all grants), then explain that. As a reviewer, I don’t know whether to take the narrative number or the CV number as the most true in my evaluation. To play it safe, the lower number is better (at least they’re both true-ish then).
• Narrative: Do not spend time talking about what you did before you were an Assistant Professor. Unless your promotion and tenure guidelines have a specific line about consideration of work before you were hired, don’t spend much time on that. As a reviewer, we usually can’t talk about it and committees can’t count it unless there is an explicit reason to in the guidelines for assessment.
• Narrative: Firsting: Do not state that something you are doing is entirely new, or precedents do not exist. I just need one example to show that’s not true, and it’s NEVER TRUE. It’s a risky thing to set up a review to disprove you.
• Narrative: Date your cover letter or dossier, or at least provide the dates inclusive that are being evaluated in your narrative. I can tell when you start by the date you’re hired, but I don’t know when to stop evaluating. Since most files are not submitted on December 31, I need to know how partial the final year of evaluation is. For instance, if I’m making a case you’ve done 3 articles/year, I need to know where that final year falls.

For more information on how to support external reviwers, check out Sherry Pagoto’s bluesky thread: “I have been on Promotion and Tenure Committees for several years now. Here are some things I wish candidates knew. A thread!”