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When professional services firms need to quickly store and access resumes (CVs) for proposals, shared drives like Google Drive or SharePoint are often the go-to solution. For a boutique firm with a handful of employees, these kinds of tools might suffice. However, larger firms, or even growing boutiques will quickly find inefficiencies when using simple shared folders.
With each of your employees needing multiple resumes, tailored and styled for different bids, and each of these versions needing to be kept up-to-date when a new skill, certification or experience is achieved, staying on top of it all becomes increasingly impractical.
The solution? A resume or CV database. These databases are purpose-built tools that enable the centralized storage, management, and usage of employee resumes. They not only help teams create and maintain consistent resumes, but they also provide a range of tools that help bid teams improve their overall proposal processes.
If you want to read into all of these benefits in-depth (which we highly recommend!), we have a dedicated whitepaper on the subject here. However, if you want a quick overview of the key differences between resume databases and shared drives, keep reading below!
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A major challenge with shared drives is the lack of control over how resume data is captured and structured. Even with the best processes and templates, there’s no way to absolutely guarantee consistency using shared drives. CV Partner solves this by providing a custom resume builder that guides users to input details in a standardized way using your firm's approved terminology, skills lists, and structures. This ensures consistency across all employee profiles. The database approach also streamlines making updates, since users just focus on content rather than wrestling with formatting issues common in Word docs or InDesign. Overall, it results in higher quality, up-to-date, and consistently branded resumes showcasing the latest employee accomplishments and qualifications - giving your firm the best chance of winning bids.
For firms relying on shared drives, it's virtually impossible to harness the full expertise of their workforce when putting together proposal teams. Manually scanning documents to find specific skills and credentials is impractical as employee numbers grow. A resume database like CV Partner transforms resume content into a rich, queryable database. Advanced search filters let you construct precise queries to instantly surface the perfect team - whether it's finding a Project Manager with 7 years of Change Management experience in Banking & Finance, or any other combination of skills and backgrounds. This data-driven approach replaces guesswork and bias, ensuring you put forward your absolute best resources for every opportunity.
Tailoring resumes to align with the bid requirements is another arduous process with shared drives. Manually replicating content, rewriting bios, and reordering details to meet the client’s needs can be a huge drain of resources. Once again, a resume database can streamline this process by letting you work from the centralized employee profile. A resume database like CV Partner’s provides you with a drag-and-drop builder that allows users to quickly reorder experience sections, hide/unhide details, and rewrite specific sections - all without editing the master data. Even better, you can save these tailored versions as reusable templates for future bids. This eliminates duplicative efforts and ensures you're always working from an accurate, approved source.
One of the key advantages of a resume database is the ability to automatically export employee profiles into branded or bid-specified templates. As shared drives simply host static documents, they offer no solution to automate this process. CV Partner eliminates any manual reformatting work via rules-based templates that map resume data to properly styled layouts. Whether it's your corporate branding or strict RFP requirements, such as the SF330 form, templates populate perfect resumes in just clicks. This drastically reduces time spent on menial copying, pasting and reformatting, giving your bid teams the time and mindspace to work on more strategic initiatives. Over 50% of CV Partner users reported saving 50+ hours per month on bid processes - and we strongly suspect templates are a huge reason for that!
To learn more about these key benefits, and to delve into six additional ways resume databases differ to shared drives, download the whitepaper here.
Or, to learn more about CV Partner, and schedule a personalized demo, click on the chat icon on the bottom right of your screen. Look forward to chatting soon!