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In the hyper-competitive world of construction proposals, it’s essential you source your best team for each new RFP. Yet, during each proposal bid managers must navigate various challenges. Often, they’ll spend hours going back and forth with colleagues, over email, phone, and Slack, trying to hunt down the key people who should be a part of the project team. With hundreds, if not thousands of employees, potentially spread across different time zones, this is no small feat. Then, even after sourcing their dream team, they have to find the relevant CVs and resumes, and hope (or pray!) that the details are up-to-date. The process is inefficient, contains multiple bottlenecks, and is not easily repeatable.
However, there is a better way. By transitioning away from storing CVs and resumes in static PDF or Word documents, and instead using a dedicated CV database - such as CV Partner, construction firms can make the process of identifying their dream team much more efficient. This blog will focus on how this works in more detail.
Before bid managers can conduct a search across their firm, it’s first necessary that your firm’s CVs and resumes are up-to-date and consistent.
By handling profile data in a dedicated platform, rather than in static documents, CV Partner streamlines this process. Here are some ways how:
Removing formatting issues
When adding new experiences or achievements to their profile, users don’t have to go through the ordeal of formatting their actual CV or resume. By removing this friction, it gives users more incentive to update their data more frequently.
Standardizing terminology
When setting up (or simply refining) their CV Partner platform, admins can mandate the terminology used across their system. This is done by utilizing drop-downs, autofills, or find and replace tools. By controlling these naming conventions, bid managers create a consistent glossary for roles, skills, accreditations, and more - ensuring CVs and resumes are consistent, and that the platform is easily searchable.
Syncing Project data
Because CV Partner enables firms to store reference projects (or pull-in projects from an ERP/CRM), project data can be synced to the employees associated with those projects. This means project updates are automated, and project data is consistent across the whole team.
Improving accountability
As there is greater visibility into CV and resume data, users can be held more accountable for keeping their profiles up-to-date. Platform reports can also identify users who haven’t updated their profiles in a while, or users who are missing certain sections.
Now that all of your employee’s data is up-to-date, and in a standardized format, sourcing your best team becomes a piece of cake. Instead of the tedious back and forth trying to surface your best talent, bid managers can use CV Partner’s sophisticated search filters to source their best people. Using an example, we can visualize these benefits more clearly:
Let’s say a bid manager needs to identify a project manager with 5+ years of experience, who has used PIM systems, and has experience on LEED Gold certified buildings. Rather than painfully relaying these requirements across their company, they can now simply search across the system. First, they would search for the job title: Project Manager. Then they can toggle to a minimum of 5 years of experience, specifically in that job function. Next, they layer in AND functionality to search for PIM in skills, as well as the keywords “LEED Gold”, which may surface from a user’s project experiences, or the project data itself. Then, when presented with a number of suitable profiles, they can then easily perform a side-by-side comparison, or look for additional skills that may resonate with the bid requirements. Once the dream team is sourced, they can then easily add the team’s profiles to a proposal, and export CVs and resumes into the required formats.
As you can see, this ability to search for candidates fast-tracks the entire process - and it also comes with some additional value-adds. One is that it enables you to be more flexible with your hunt. For example, by adapting search criteria slightly, you may come across a candidate who is slightly junior, with only 4 years experience, but who’s experience otherwise perfectly aligns to the bid. This provides a greater pool of candidates who otherwise may have been overlooked. A second benefit of searching in this manner is that it removes any biases. With a more objective search process you can see who is the best candidate on paper, based on skills and experience, rather than anecdotal feelings. Of course, there is also value in speaking to coworkers to ascertain opinions on certain employees and their suitability for the role - but having this as a secondary stage can help to improve impartiality.
With a centralized CV database, bid managers can find their best team in a matter of clicks - streamlining the proposal process. Then, profiles can be tailored to meet the bid requirements, and exported into templates that meet the proposal requirements.