Your company’s CV should not be a boring document you need to submit for bid compliance, but considered a marketing tool where you sell your unique skills, expertise and potential to solve the problem. Also, evaluators who read CVs in competitive bids have a lot to do and you therefore need to stand out immediately. The bid evaluator attention span should be thought of as 5 seconds long, and therefore, the front page and the rest of the document should have the most relevant keywords easily readable on the front page.

In an increasingly competitive and knowledge driven marketplace for professional services, you need to sell each consultants most relevant skills and certifications. Often, your colleagues has a wide range of skills, and therefore, we recommend to have a template that allows you to easily highlight the most relevant skills and experiences on the front page. For all CV Partner clients, we can create a template that allows for highlighting of skills, educations, certifications, projects or roles on the front page in a proposal. When we say “highlighting” we mean the possibility to easily tailor and change the contents of the CV or Case Study for each bid, with just a few clicks.

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Checklist and tips to consider when tailoring a CV for a bid

• Are you using the client or evaluators own words when it comes to roles, industries or skills? If not, re-write the tailored CV
• Is the most relevant skills, experiences, educations or certifications showcased or highlighted on the front page?
• Is relevant and up to date certifications and courses included in each CV?
• Does the CV/Resume include how many years experience the employee have in a relevant industry or with a relevant skill?
• Does the photograph look professional?
• Is the projects added in reverse chronological order, and is the most recent project included?
• If there have been measurable results or improvements in similar projects, make sure to add it in the CV
• If a course or training session also included a certification, make sure to include both in the CV
• Ask a colleague what their impression is after looking at a CV for 10 seconds, what keywords stuck in their mind and why?

When submitting several CVs or a as a team, make sure to use similar terminology and the same format for all CVs/Resumes. This can easily be achieved in CV Partner since you can quickly choose the export format before submitting the bid. Also, if the team members offered for this project has worked together in the past, the project descriptions in their CV should be identical.

Example - Using the clients own terminology in the bid

The RFQ, bid or tender document calls for a person with experience in the role as “Visual Designer”. Perhaps your own terminology in your CVs/Resumes and Case Studies is the very similar term “Graphic Designer”. In this case it is recommended to replace the terminology in the roles with the clients own terminology. This can very easily be done in CV Partner in a tailored proposal.

The same method can also be applied to experience in certain technologies, if the client is looking for someone with experience working with the application “Trello” but you use “Asana” or another similar tool, the recommendation is to rewrite the technology to “Asana - project management software similar to Trello”. You can easily rename each skill and technology in the copy of the CV for that specific proposal, without changing the master CV.

Start early and plan ahead!

Sometimes the deadline for the bid is rapidly approaching while you have other important tasks to manage. Therefore you should take the time to build a library of tailored summaries, key points and texts in your own or your colleagues CV. In this way, you can easily pick the most relevant version of the CV when the bid deadline approaches.

How are you working with CVs and Case Studies? Share your best tips with us on the chat down in the right corner!

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