When applying for a job, you tailor the CV to the recipient, making sure you have relevant information standing out. The same is true when selling consulting, engineering or legal services. Highlighting relevant skills and experiences makes you stand out from the competition. Having mentioned a similarity with these types of CV creation and management processes, what is the difference between a job application CV and a professional services CV?

How a Bid/proposal Professional Services CV differs from a job application CV:

• More emphasis on projects and customer value 
• Project descriptions with actual client names, context, industry, project type, role, and much more
• Less emphasis on hobbies, personal traits, non-professional achievements unless relevant for winning the bid or proposal (which is quite rare)
• Often written in third person instead of first person
• Your professional services CV need to harmonise with the case studies and other CVs that are used when your company sells your CV as a part of a team, solution or in a wider context
• Your professional services CV needs can benefit from using the same terminology as your clients do
• Matching layout across the company, not with the users preference
• + a lot more

In short, a professional services CV has richer and more relevant data that is needed to respond to bids and proposals. In most cases, the content of a job application CV needs to be re-written to meet the requirements of a professional services client, or even for an RFQ or RFP. That said, some of the content can be re-used.

Relevant unique selling points (USPs) for having CV Partner instead of using your HR tool to manage CVs

• Support for CVs as well as references/case studies
  
• Support for both MS Word and PowerPoint
  
• Advanced and feature-complete template generator
• Dedicated template support with short lead times
• Tailoring and versions of a cv/case study
• Edit history
• Suggestions and help texts
• Support for government, public and NGO tenders
• Dedicated support chat for all users
• Security certifications and backups
• Capture and standardisation of skills, courses, certifications etc.
• No need for having another tool to track courses and certifications - CV Partner has this built in!
• Tailoring a CV to an industry and client is easier if the content is structured within CV Partner
  

In other words, a CV is not a CV! However, you might have some data in your CVs or in a HR tool that is relevant for bids and proposals. Using the CV Partner API, you can synchronise this data. What data does it make sense to synchronise?

What data can be re-used from your HR/talent tool to augment the CVs in CV Partner?

In most cases, the following sections can be re-used from a job application CV to a professional services CV:

• Work history
• Certifications
• Courses
• Key skills such as programming languages, methodologies etc

Contact CV Partner to learn more about how we can help you with your CVs and Case Studies