How professional services CVs were created before Flowcase
Before Flowcase, most consultants, engineers or lawyers would write their professional services CV directly into a Word or Powerpoint file, allowing them to write any text or wording when describing their projects, experiences or skills. This gave the user flexibility, but also made it challenging to keep the wording and spelling consistent across large datasets. Each consultant or engineer would write a skill, certification, industry or project type using different terminology. Also, each CV owner would spend time finding the relevant wording that is used within the company when populating the same fields.
The innovative Flowcase approach
When using Flowcase SaaS in your organisation, the formatting and template is taken out of the equation. In fact, the users do not even have to have Word or Powerpoint installed on their device. They simply input their CV directly in Flowcase in their browser. In Flowcase we have created dedicated fields and a structured database keeps track of what data belongs where. This allows you to standardise on terminology as well as provide relevant suggestions that save time for each user when writing their professional services CV.
Getting quality and consistent data in an efficient way includes allowing the user to input new information, combined with offering relevant suggestions and standardised texts where relevant. The Flowcase SasS solves this by employing a hybrid solution where both suggestions and official values give the user the option to both save time as well as select the relevant field for their use case.
In the background, admin users can access the master data tool to keep track of official values, suggestions and rules for suggested values. When a user ads a text or keyword that deviates from the norm or standard, this can easily be managed and changed with the click of a button. This way you get the flexibility and power of allowing the users to add new fields when relevant, combined with the possibility of having semi-static dropdown lists.
Having static or locked "dropdown" fields vs. the free text option
When creating Flowcase we decided not to "lock" the fields entirely for two reasons. Firstly, this will not allow you to capture new skills, roles and experiences that your employees have that might not be in the official list yet. This is particularly important for skills and certifications who are constantly evolving and it is hard to maintain a fixed and continuously updated list. Secondly, names evolve over time, for example industry names and you might want to change this in the future, therefore we have this master data tool that allows you to update this from a central location and the updated terminology or data will propagate to the CVs. If a user adds some new data that is not in the master data system or in any other CV, you can easily find and manage these suggestions in masterdata. Here, admin users can and create rules to either make them official or rename to the defined standard.
In other words, the fields are not "locked". After testing various options and alternatives we have found that in practice a hybrid between locked fields, and allowing the user to have flexibility works better than locking them down. In almost all cases, the users will choose the official values, you are also able to capture data that you otherwise would have missed, alternatively that the field would have remained empty.
In other words, in Flowcase you can have full control over all of the content across all CV and Case Studies. You can also manage this at scale across all users and languages. One example is for example if a customer name changes, you can change this data in the master data section of Flowcase and all fields (both CVs and Case Studies) will have the updated value instantly. Learn more about the Flowcase masterdata here.
Flowcase have masterdata for fields which includes, skill names, skill categories, role names, courses, educations, project types, languages and a few other fields. Here you can set your standard or default terminology (in several languages) and these will be the suggestions that appear first when a user updates their CV.
If you want to learn more about how Flowcase can help your business save time and get better quality content, reach out to us below!
