As an engineering firm, the success of your proposals depends on the talent, skills, and experiences of your employees. However, identifying and showcasing your perfect project team can be tricky. With employee CVs and resumes scattered across siloed documents, it can be incredibly difficult to get a bird’s eye view of your firm’s expertise. Plus, when you finally have your team assembled, tailoring their profiles to the bid is a time-intensive exercise.
This guide provides engineering firms with actionable steps to streamline the process of sourcing and presenting your key personnel in a way that helps you win more bids.
Step 1 - Understanding the brief
It may sound obvious, but your first step is to thoroughly understand the RFP and determine the precise skills, experiences, and qualifications needed for the project. Your goal here isn't just to check the boxes and meet the basic requirements. You need to show that you’ve understood the brief down to the last detail and show that your team has the unique set of capabilities to meet, or better yet, exceed the proposal brief. With this in mind, you can identify the key roles needed, and highlight any supporting skills and experiences that would really wow the client. Once you have these key personnel requirements outlined, you can continue to the next step: sourcing your team.
Step 2 - Identifying your dream team
As we’ve touched on, sourcing your perfect project team is easier said than done. Bid managers can spend countless hours going back and forth trying to understand their colleagues’ backgrounds, especially when more niche experience is required. Information spread across siloed documents creates a lack of transparency, prolonging the response time and taking focus away from competing tasks.
With a CV and resume database tool, such as Flowcase, you can streamline this process. By creating a centralized repository of all of your employees’ professional experiences, you can quickly perform granular searches based on skills, experience, qualifications, and more, to gather your dream team. Skills reports can also be used to identify overlaps of different expertise. This level of visibility not only fast-tracks the process of finding the right team for the job but also helps remove unconscious biases by objectively surfacing the employees whose backgrounds align closest with the project. This means you’ll have full confidence you're presenting your firm with your best foot forward.
Learn how else Flowcase is tailor-made for Engineering firms
Step 3 - Tailoring experience to meet the RFP
You've identified the perfect team on paper, but you still need to make their profiles resonate with the proposal. To do this, you must carefully tailor the language to the bid, emphasizing each individual’s most relevant experiences.
This involves:
- Writing custom bios for each employee relating directly to the proposal at hand.
- Including past projects and roles that are pertinent to the bid, while excluding those that offer no value.
- Reworking achievement descriptions using language from the RFP.
- Reordering content so the most relevant experience comes first.
Again, a CV and resume database tool can help to streamline this process. With Flowcase, bid managers can easily make these adjustments in an integrated platform. Custom bios and achievement sections can be created for the proposal at hand, without altering the master CV or resume. Meanwhile, these tailored sections can be saved and easily re-used at a future date - enabling you to customize proposals efficiently, over and over again.
Step 4 - Formatting CVs to meet guidelines
Once you've customized the content of the CV or resume, you still need to format the data into consistent, well-designed templates. This challenge is magnified for engineering firms as you often need to export data into mandated formats, such as regional, government, or sector-specific templates. You may also be asked to provide different versions of your CVs or resumes - for example, a condensed version for your pitch deck, accompanied by full-length PDFs in the appendix. Repeating this formatting for your whole team can be incredibly tedious and time-consuming.
Flowcase’s templating functionality enables you to showcase your employees' backgrounds in whichever layout is required. With years of experience working with engineering firms, we have a strong understanding of the key template style required. Meanwhile, our template team can create custom-branded formats with in-built rules. This means that gone are the days of copying, pasting, and reformatting data into the night. Instead, all you need to do is select the format you need, and export in just a few clicks.
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Identifying and showcasing your key personnel can be a thankless task when done manually. With a CV and resume database tool, such as Flowcase, you can streamline the process of sourcing your team, emphasizing their key experiences, and exporting their profiles into beautiful templates - helping you to win more business, in less time.
PS: Did you know that Flowcase also helps engineering firms showcase their Reference Projects? Learn more here
