‍Privacy laws requires your employees to have access to their personal data

Privacy laws such as the GDPR and the UK Data Protection Act gives data subjects the right to access, rectify and delete their personal data. Most of the data in a CV or resume is considered personal data so you will need an efficient way of providing your employees opportunities to exercise their rights. ​​By having access to the CV Partner tool you can ensure compliance with data privacy laws and reap the benefits of employees taking ownership of keeping their CVs or resumes up-to-date.

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What CV data should the user be able to access and edit?

Some of the information relevant for bids and proposals, such as certifications, courses or industry experience is information that only the user themselves have up-to-date information on. Therefore they should be able to update and edit this information without involving and taking up time from more resources. At the same time, some information, such as shared project descriptions, your company’s terminology or taxonomies of skills might be something you want more control over. This can be done using the CV Partner shared project description as well as master data tools, in other words, you can achieve both goals using CV Partner.

Data from other systems needs to be enriched

You might have data relevant for CVs, resumes, and case studies in other systems. For example, you have employment history, education and courses in your HRM system, and information about projects in your ERP system. Common denominator for these types of data include: 

1. They can in most cases be integrated or easily imported into CV Partner
2. They need to be enriched by the sales or bid team to use relevant terminology and to fit in a sales or bid/proposal use case
3. New information needs to be added frequently, as new projects are completed, and new experiences gained.

Integrating and importing data can easily be achieved when using CV Partner.

Your bid team is the only ones updating your CVs or resumes

Your bid team's time should be spent on more value creating activities than manually updating CVs, resumes, and case studies in Word or Powerpoint. The employees themselves have a much easier task of maintaining their own information (not to mention the self-interest) than to have a small team of bid managers do that on someone else's behalf. With CV Partner, your bid team can edit any CVs or resumes, as well as create tailored versions for bids and proposals. This combination of the employee themselves adding relevant information, and then the bid team adding the finishing touches is what makes you win more bids and save time.

How frequent should a professional services CV or resume be updated?

Some clients report that their employees have multi-year assignments and therefore don’t have to update their CV or resume more than once per year. CV or resume data is a perishable good, you need to document it continuously at the risk of forgetting relevant information. The skills and experience of this person is still relevant for your company, both for bids but also internally for knowledge sharing and discovery. For example, your overall years experience with a certain skill or technology might be relevant for other bids. The number of people with certification X, Y or Z might be the deciding factor when winning a large public tender. In our experience, the most successful companies get their consultants to update their CV or resume bi-monthly.

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I can generate a CV in PDF from my HR system

Does this PDF have your fonts, colors and logo? Can they be used for bids and proposals? In almost all cases where a professional services firm use a HR system to manage their CV or resume data, they end up having a shadow system (Sharepoint with Word-files) used by the bid team for the following reasons:

• The data is not updated
• The format exported is not editable and usable for bids
• The content needs tailoring and formatting

‍The bottom line

‍CVs or resume for bids and proposals share some similarities with how you would write your own CV or resume in a job application. You wouldn’t let someone else maintain or tailor your CV or resume without seeing it before you apply for a job, so why should it be different when you are employed and your CV or resume is used to win bids and projects? If you make it easy for your employees to update their CV or resume, they might just do the job for you.