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When it comes to submitting a winning proposal, your firm’s ability to meet (or exceed!) RFP scoring criteria is critical. Presenting your team is a key component in this, with many tenders allotting a significant portion of the total points to how closely the project team fits their needs. For instance, they might award 10 points if your proposed team has a certain mandatory certification or 15 points for a minimum number of years experience in a key methodology, and so on.
But how can your team consistently score highly?
Having qualified personnel, and seeking out relevant projects are the obvious first steps, but often that’s not enough. On top of this, you have to be clever when articulating your team’s attributes. In fact, including highly relevant resumes (CVs) that use the right terminology can be the difference between your bid rising to the top or ending up in the reject pile.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how your firm can leverage its knowledge of past RFP requirements and marry that with CV Partner’s Masterdata feature to boost your proposal score.
A smart first step is to carefully review previous RFP requirements, both for opportunities you've won and lost. Pay close attention to the specific phrasing and keywords clients use when outlining mandatory qualifications, certifications, skills, and experiences. What did evaluators prioritize and assign significant point values to?
For example, did they put heavy emphasis on "Agile project management" experience? Or did they prioritize professionals with "PRINCE2" or "PgMP" certifications? Make note of any recurring terms in a spreadsheet.
Soon you'll start noticing patterns in how different clients, industries, or engagement types articulate their personnel needs. With these terms captured, you can then start to reverse engineer the process and strategically adapt your team’s existing resume content to include these skills or experiences.
Once you've assembled a glossary of high-scoring terms, the next step is to make it as easy as possible for your teams to include those keywords when writing their resumes. That's where CV Partner's Masterdata feature comes in.
Our Masterdata tool enables platform admins to create a database of approved skills, roles, project experiences, certifications, courses, and more. Your staff can then pull from this centralized skills library when populating their resume details, ensuring firm-wide consistency.
For instance, if you find clients frequently prioritize "Project Management Professional (PMP)" you can create that as a standard credential listing in your library. Rather than consultants having to remember the precise "PMP" wording, they can simply select that approved certification from a dropdown when building their resume. This removes any guesswork about what the correct terminology is (while also avoiding typos or any other errors).
CV Partner also makes it easy to continuously refine these approved terms based on new RFP learnings. For example, maybe a newer, more common-place term (eg. ‘QA Engineer’) is being used to describe an existing skill (eg. ‘Software Tester’). The admin can modify the term in the Masterdata section, and all resumes that contain the old term will be updated.
By carefully studying previous RFPs to identify the specific skills and qualifications that clients value most, your team can leverage CV Partner's Masterdata tool to establish an approved skills library using proven terminology. With this list built out, your staff can rapidly create and tailor resumes that align perfectly with the client’s priorities - maximizing your overall proposal score.