Crafting an effective resume (or CV) for an RFP is a delicate blend of art and science. It requires clear, concise writing, sprinkled with a touch of magic dust to stand out to the proposal evaluator.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the intricacies of creating exceptional RFP resumes. From structuring your content for maximum impact to tailoring your language for each unique opportunity, we'll cover everything that consultants and bid teams need to know to elevate their resume writing game - enabling you to improve productivity and most importantly, boost win rates.
1. Outlining The Makeup Of A Winning Resume
Before we dig into how to write winning resumes, it’s first important to understand who should write the resume, how they should structure it, and how to identify the specific terminology to focus on.
1.1 Who Should Write the RFP Resume: A Collaborative Approach
When it comes to who should write the RFP resume, different professional services firms employ different approaches. While some firms empower their consultants to create and maintain their own resumes, many firms are less trustworthy, preferring marketing, business development, or dedicated bid teams to take on this task to ensure consistency.
We recommend a compromise between the two:
The consultant creates the base/master resume:
We believe that the consultants themselves should create and update their master resumes. After all, who knows their achievements and experiences better than they do? Trusting your project teams ensures that resume content is authentic and accurate, and it empowers them to take pride in ongoing updates.
If you’re a bid manager or marketer reading this, you might be thinking, “That sounds great in theory, but in reality it causes inconsistencies and a lack of quality control”.
It’s true, using typical methods of creating a resume, such as via a Word Doc, could introduce a high level of variation. However, using a platform like Flowcase makes this process much more precise. The platform guides users through the resume creation process with predefined sections and governed terminology. This structure ensures consistency across all resumes while allowing individual expertise to shine through. Moreover, it enables easy updates, ensuring that resumes remain current and relevant.
The bid team tailors the resume for the RFP submission:
Once the master resumes are created, bid professionals can then take the reins for RFP-specific customization. As proposal experts who have in-depth knowledge of the customer and the project, they have the perspective to fine-tune the resumes for each unique opportunity.
This tailoring process involves customizing the text, adding or removing sections, and highlighting the most relevant experiences and skills for the bid. The result is a hyper-tailored resume that directly addresses the client's needs and evaluation criteria. We go into a lot more detail about how to tailor the resume later in this guide.
This collaborative approach combines the authenticity of individual input with the strategic oversight of bid specialists. It not only produces more compelling RFP resumes but also fosters a sense of ownership and pride among team members, ultimately contributing to higher-quality proposals and a more invested workforce.
1.2. How To Structure The RFP Resume
Structuring your team’s RFP resume in a standardized manner is important to give the right hierarchy to your team's qualifications while ensuring easy readability for evaluators.
It’s important to remember that resumes built for proposals should follow a different structure than personal employment resumes. Rather than giving precedence to employment history, RFP resumes should prioritize specific project roles.
The following structure is most typical:
- Personal Statement / Statement of Qualifications
- Relevant Project Experience
- Key Skills and Certifications
- Employment History
- Education and Professional Development
This order places the most critical information at the forefront. The personal statement provides an immediate overview of qualifications, followed by relevant project experience, which demonstrates hands-on expertise directly related to the RFP requirements. Key skills and certifications come next, allowing evaluators to quickly assess for specific competencies. Career history and educational background, while important, are positioned later as supporting information.
While there's some flexibility in this structure - for example, some firms may prioritize career history over key skills - we find that this arrangement effectively prioritizes the most pertinent details for RFP evaluators.
1.3. Understanding The Nuances Of Terminology
Before diving into the actual writing of your RFP resume, it's crucial to understand and implement the optimal terminology.
Just as personal resumes are often screened by Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), RFP resumes undergo similar scrutiny. Evaluators, whether human or automated, scan for specific keywords, experiences, and skills. This box-checking exercise can help weed out poor submissions, or alternatively, push high-performing resumes to the top of the pile. Therefore, ensuring these elements are not only present but presented in the most effective way is key to standing out.
To master this aspect of resume writing, start by studying previous RFP criteria, both from successful and unsuccessful bids. Pay close attention to the specific phrasing and keywords used by clients when outlining mandatory qualifications, certifications, skills, and experiences. What did evaluators prioritize and assign significant point values to? For instance, did they emphasize "Agile project management" experience or prioritize professionals with "PRINCE2" or "PgMP" certifications? Compile these high-value terms and phrases in a centralized document.
Once you've assembled this glossary of high-scoring terms, the next step is to integrate them seamlessly into your resume writing process. This is where a robust resume management software, like Flowcase, becomes invaluable. Our platform specifically uses a Masterdata tool, which allows the firm’s admin to create a database of approved skills, roles, project experiences, certifications, and more. These can then be encouraged (or even mandated) for resume usage, via drop-downs and auto-completes.
For example, if you find clients frequently prioritize "Project Management Professional (PMP)," you can create that as a standard credential listing in your library. This approach removes guesswork about correct terminology, prevents typos, and allows for easy updates across all resumes when industry terms evolve.
It goes without saying, but terms shouldn’t be used where not applicable. Proposal evaluators will catch insincere usage, so they should always be used authentically, truly representing your team's qualifications. By understanding the importance of these keywords, you’ll be one step ahead of your competition in creating RFP resumes that not only meet but exceed evaluation criteria.
2. How To Write the Master Resume
Next, we can get to the crux of this guide: writing winning resumes. In this section, we’ll walk you through how consultants, engineers, lawyers, and any other billable professional can create their master resume.
The master resume should include all of your project experiences, your entire list of skills and certifications, your whole employment history, and your education. This is to serve as a foundation for bid teams, who can then choose whatis relevant to include or exclude for specific proposals.
For each resume section, we’ll include best practices around the recommended length, the key topics to cover, and strong examples where applicable.
2.1 Personal Statement / Statement of Qualifications
The personal statement, also known as a statement of qualifications, is a crucial component of your master resume. After all, you only get one chance to make a strong first impression.
The statement should serve as a powerful introduction, providing a snapshot of your professional identity and key strengths.
Aim for a length of 3-5 sentences or about 50-75 words. The statement should be an overview of what you want to be known for in your professional life. As such, it should include:
- Your current role and years of experience
- Key areas of expertise or specialization
- Notable achievements or unique selling points
- Professional philosophy or approach to your work
Use strong, action-oriented language and focus on your most impressive and broadly applicable qualifications (remember, the statement will likely be tailored for the RFP submission). Additionally, avoid using jargon that might be specific to certain projects or clients, and instead opt for widely recognized industry terms.
An example of a strong personal statement is outlined below:
"Dan is a Senior Civil Engineer with over 15 years of experience, specializing in sustainable urban development. He has a proven track record of leading multimillion-dollar projects from conception to completion, consistently delivering on time and under budget. Known for innovative problem-solving approaches that balance technical requirements with environmental considerations, Dan is committed to fostering collaborative team environments and pulling everyone towards the end vision."
This personal statement provides a comprehensive overview of the professional's experience, expertise, achievements, and work philosophy, serving as an excellent starting point for tailoring to specific RFPs.
2.2 Project Experiences
The Project Experiences section is the heart of your master resume, demonstrating your hands-on expertise and achievements. This section should provide a comprehensive overview of your most significant and relevant projects, serving as a rich resource for tailoring to specific RFPs later.
We recommend including 8-12 of your most impressive and diverse projects from the past 10 years. This range provides enough variety to showcase your breadth of experience while keeping the resume focused on your most recent and relevant work. Like your employment history on a personal resume, they should be presented in reverse chronological order.
A recommended structure for each project entry is found below:
- Project Name and Duration: Include the project title and the timeframe (e.g., "Urban Renewal Project, January 2019 - March 2021").
- Client Name: Include if not confidential. If confidential, use a descriptive placeholder (e.g., "Major Metropolitan Municipality").
- Project Overview: 2-3 sentence overview, outlining the project's scope, key challenges, and desired outcomes.
- Your Role: 4-5 sentences/bullet points, outlining your role and primary responsibilities.
The key thing to nail in this section is highlighting the role you played in the project. Describe the specific steps you took to address any challenges and contribute to the project's success. Where possible, highlight the results of your efforts, ideally using quantifiable metrics to prove your success. Also, outline any key skills/technologies/methodologies you employed and how they affected the project.
2.3 Skills & Certifications
As mentioned earlier, the Skills & Certifications section should have more emphasis on an RFP resume than in your regular professional resume. This is because proposal evaluators will scan resumes quickly, specifically looking for the key skills, technologies, and/or methodologies that they need to fill as part of their project team. While these skills should be referred to in your project experiences and potentially in your personal statement, a designated section can help evaluators easily identify your strong points.
It’s important to remember what we discussed in section 1.3, in terms of using the correct or ‘optimal’ terminology here. When outlining your skill or certification, use the most commonly accepted phrasing to describe it, in order to make it as clear and acceptable as possible.
Here's how to structure this section effectively:
- Categorization: Group skills into logical categories such as Technical Skills, Software Proficiencies, Soft Skills, and Industry-Specific Knowledge.
- Prioritization: Within each category, list skills in order of relevance to your field and typical RFP requirements. Start with the most relevant and in-demand skills.
- Proficiency Levels: For each skill, years of experience, and/or level of expertise.
- Certifications: List relevant professional certifications, including the certifying body and date of acquisition.
Example: Technical Skills:
- Structural Engineering (Expert, 15+ years)
- AutoCAD (Advanced, 10 years)
- Building Information Modeling (BIM) (Intermediate, 5 years)
Certifications:
- Professional Engineer (PE), State of California, 2010
- LEED Accredited Professional, U.S. Green Building Council, 2015
2.4 Employment History
While the Employment History (or work history, or career experience, etc) section is less emphasized in RFP resumes compared to regular resumes, it's still important to include. Keep this section concise and focused and structure it how you would typically organize a personal resume work history:
- List positions in reverse chronological order.
- Include company name, your title, and dates of employment.
- Provide a brief description (3-5 bullets) of your role, key responsibilities, and major achievements.
Where possible, and while maintaining authenticity, communicate achievements that relate to your current role - even if they were not your core responsibility at the time. For example, even if Project Management might have been a secondary task in one of your earlier jobs, if you are now a Project Management consultant, you should move this to the forefront of your job description, highlighting its importance for where you are now.
2.5 Education and Professional Development
Again, the Education section should be similar to how you present it in a regular resume:
- List degrees in reverse chronological order.
- Include institution name, degree earned, and graduation date.
- Mention any academic honors or relevant topics to your role.
- Include relevant continuing education or professional development courses.
Example: Master of Science in Civil Engineering, Stanford University, 2010
- Thesis: "Innovative Approaches to Sustainable Urban Infrastructure"
Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 2008
- Graduated with Honors
2.6 How To Update Your Master Resume Effectively
Of course, writing your master resume isn't a one-time task. Keeping your resume up-to-date with your latest achievements is key to showcasing your best self. When updating your resume, consider the following pointers.
When entering new experiences, aim to use fresh terminology and phrasing to avoid repetition and to capture a wider range of keywords. This approach not only keeps your resume engaging but also enhances your profile to evaluators looking for key terms. If your latest project experience is particularly impressive, consider giving more page space to this. If this means refining some of your previous entries, don’t be afraid to do this. You want to ensure that your most recent and relevant achievements take center stage.
Updating your resume gives you an excuse to spend some time reviewing your existing entries. When doing so, consider the evolving trends in your industry and incorporate relevant buzzwords or emerging technologies if you have used them in the past. This ensures your resume is current and speaks the language of an industry expert. Also, throughout this process, maintain a consistent tone and level of detail across all entries. This creates a cohesive narrative of your professional journey and presents a polished and professional image to the reviewer.
2.7 How Flowcase Empowers Autonomous Resume Writing And Updates
Flowcase streamlines the resume writing process, making it more efficient and user-friendly for consultants, and giving peace of mind to bid teams.
As briefly mentioned earlier, the platform provides a predefined structure that ensures consistency across all resumes within an organization. This structure aligns with the best practices we’ve mentioned in this guide, and it includes textual guidance and character limits for each section, helping users understand exactly how to complete their resumes.
Another feature we’ve mentioned that is worth revisiting is the platform's Metadata feature. This glossary of company-defined terms enforces specific terminology across all resumes. This ensures that everyone is (metaphorically) speaking the same language and that key terms are spelled correctly. Not only does this produce a unified professional image for your organization, but it also increases the likelihood of matching evaluators' criteria in bid situations.
Flowcase also incorporates powerful AI tools to enhance the resume writing process. We focus on integrating AI features that enhance rather than replace human insights. This includes AI Proofreading that helps busy consultants quickly catch and correct errors. It also includes AI Text Reduction to help users craft concise, impactful statements that meet the bid’s character limits. And for international organizations, our AI Translations tool enables quick and accurate translations of resumes into a range of languages.
Perhaps the most significant advantage of Flowcase is the ease of inputting data. Instead of contending with clunky word processors, where moving a text box or image can throw the whole document into disarray, our platform provides a seamless user experience. Users can freely make edits and updates without worrying about layout issues or formatting inconsistencies. This makes the process of consistently updating resumes a less arduous affair for your consultants.
Ultimately, this gives bid teams the peace of mind that the resumes they’re looking at are current, of high quality, and ready to be tailored. This leads us nicely into our next section…
3. How To Write Tailored Resume Content
In this next section, we’ll discuss how bid professionals can tailor resume content to meet the needs of the prospective client.
Tailoring your team’s resumes is an essential part of the proposal process. It tells the client that you understand their challenges, and that you have the team with the specific skills and expertise to fill their needs. Your team’s resumes should communicate how each employee has the experience to directly address specific aspects of the client's proposal and that, as a collective unit, your team has the expertise to excel when delivering the project.
We’ll discuss best practices around tailoring the structure of the resume and customizing the personal statement and project experiences sections, and how Flowcase can help in both of these steps.
3.1 Tailoring The Structure Of The Resume
Before diving into the writing process, it's first important to determine what information to include and how to prioritize it.
First and foremost, you should prioritize relevance over comprehensiveness by selectively showing or hiding sections and experiences. This might mean temporarily removing less relevant skills or projects to spotlight those that directly align with the RFP. This helps to improve readability and not overwhelm the evaluator with too much information.
You should then consider reordering the content within your sections to put the most pertinent information at the forefront. For instance, if the RFP requires an individual with Project Management experience with a focus on Sustainability, you should ensure that the resume places Sustainability projects front and center. Unlike a personal resume where sections should always be in reverse chronological order, RFP resumes can break this rule to prioritize key information.
Lastly, you might want to ‘highlight’ especially relevant experiences or achievements. These should be the candidates' very best work that also closely meets the RFP criteria. What highlighting actually means is up to the bid team; for example, it could be that the text is bolded, the section might have a star icon next to it, or it might literally be highlighted with a background shade. The bid team has total control over how this is presented, via the use of Templates.
By strategically structuring the resume, you create a compelling narrative that directly addresses the client's needs without overloading them with extraneous information.
3.2 Tailoring The Personal Statement
The two most important parts of the resume to tailor text-wise are the Personal Statement (Statement of Qualifications) and Project Experience sections. The reason for this is pretty simple - these are the main focus points for the proposal evaluator.
When tailoring the Personal Statement, focus on aligning the existing content with the specific requirements of the RFP. Begin by identifying key phrases and requirements from the RFP that match the candidate's qualifications. Incorporate these elements into the statement, rephrasing as necessary to maintain a natural flow. If the existing statement doesn't address a crucial RFP requirement, consider adding a brief, targeted sentence to cover this gap. Conversely, if parts of the current statement aren't relevant to this particular RFP, don't hesitate to remove them. If possible, include a succinct mention of a relevant achievement or experience that directly relates to the project at hand.
Remember, unlike the generic personal statement, the goal is to quickly demonstrate the candidate's suitability for this specific project, not to provide a comprehensive overview of their entire career.
3.3 Tailoring The Project Experiences Section
Next, let’s discuss how to tailor the Project Experience section.
Since you’ve already tailored the structure of the resume, you’ve already identified the projects that are most pertinent to the RFP. For these selected projects, review the current descriptions and consider how they can be adjusted to better align with the RFP requirements. This might involve emphasizing certain aspects of the project that are particularly relevant while downplaying others. Revise the language used in the descriptions to mirror key terms and phrases from the RFP, helping to create a clear connection between the candidate's experience and the project needs. If specific technical skills or methodologies are mentioned in the RFP, try to include these in the relevant project descriptions. Also, consider adjusting the order of information within each project description, leading with the most relevant details. If quantifiable results are included, ensure they're framed in a way that's meaningful to the potential client's goals.
Additionally, if certain projects are relevant but lower down on the priority list, consider summarizing them more succinctly to maintain focus on the most applicable experiences. Ultimately, the aim is to demonstrate not just what the candidate has done, but how their specific experiences make them ideal for this particular project.
3.4 How Flowcase Facilitates Efficient Resume Tailoring
Flowcase’s features enable help bid teams to streamline the process of tailoring resumes for specific opportunities. As we discuss this, it’s important to emphasize that tailoring doesn't alter the master resume; rather, the platform creates a copy for customization, preserving the integrity of the original document.
Firstly, the platform's interface allows for easy in-situ modifications. To change the structure of the resume, users can simply toggle experiences on or off with a click, reorder sub-sections by dragging content blocks into the desired sequence, and highlight specific achievements to emphasize their relevance. Just as easily, teams can modify text directly within the platform. This flexibility enables quick adjustments without any formatting pains. Equally importantly, it keeps all changes in one platform, maintaining a source of truth - which feeds into the next two benefits.
Since tailored content is automatically connected back to the master resume (without overriding it), bid teams are able to reuse previously customized sections. Over a period of months or years, consultant profiles will accrue a repository of tailored personal statements and project sections, making it increasingly easier to repurpose this text for new opportunities. This deduplication of work can be a huge time saver for busy bid teams.
Linked to the above, because Flowcase is able to maintain the connection between tailored versions and the master resume, it resolves versioning challenges. To illustrate this, let’s consider the alternative. If you were to create a tailored resume in a static Word document or PDF, the resume would soon become outdated when the consultant changes their personal details, or adds new skills or experiences to their master version. Instead, when you work in Flowcase, tailored sections live alongside the master resume, and therefore by design, they automatically integrate master resume updates. This helps to maintain a single source of truth. As a result, users can confidently present up-to-date, accurately tailored resumes for each new opportunity without the risk of overlooking recent changes or achievements.
Via all of the benefits described above, Flowcase transforms the often tedious task of resume tailoring into a streamlined, efficient process.
4. Bonus: How To Package Your Resume
While packaging the resume for submission isn’t directly related to ‘writing effective resumes’, we know that for many bid managers, this is the most tricky part of the whole resume process.
We often hear horror stories from bid managers working well into the night copying and pasting employee data from resumes into intricate bid-mandated layouts. As a result, we created a Templates feature that helps teams to automate this process.
Templates utilize Flowcase’s structured database to export profile data into a range of flexible formats. We work with clients to help them create two types of templates: branded and bid-specific. Branded templates are those submitted for proposals where no specific formatting is required, and for company pitch decks. They're professional, consistent, and styled to your brand. Bid-specific templates, on the other hand, are designed specifically for formats requested in the RFP. With these templates, you can easily put forward large teams, all with uniform formatting, while also streamlining future RFPs from the same client.
You can learn more about Templates and how they are a key component in helping our customers save 50 hours per month, in this whitepaper.
5. Summary
In this guide we’ve discussed the following topics:
- Why consultants should write their own resumes, while bid teams should tailor them.
- Best practices for structuring an RFP resume, and how they differ from personal resumes.
- How to identify and incorporate key terminology into your resume content.
- Best practices for writing each master resume section.
- Best practices for tailoring the key resume sections.
- How Flowcase can help streamline all resume processes, including packaging resumes for submission.
We hope that equipped with this guide, you now feel more confident when navigating the resume writing process. If you’re interested in learning more about how Flowcase creates efficiencies for professional services firms in this process, reach out to us via the link below.
