SWORD struggled with CV management visibility across hundreds of consultants, which slowed down tender response. Manual CV preparation created delays, inconsistencies, and increased the risk of errors under pressure. By structuring consultant data, the team gained real-time visibility over skills and certifications. CV preparation was reduced from hours to minutes, freeing teams to focus on higher-value work. Faster and more consistent submissions improved their ability to compete in European public procurement.
Introduction
SWORD Group is one of Europe’s leading IT consulting firms, with operations spanning Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Spain, and beyond. For their Brussels team, focused almost exclusively on European institutions such as the European Commission and the European Parliament, winning public procurement contracts is a core business activity. In this environment, proper CV management in consulting firms is not an administrative task. It directly affects how quickly a company can respond to tenders and how competitive those submissions are.
The challenge they faced was not a shortage of talent. It was the inability to mobilise that talent quickly, consistently, and at the scale that high-stakes tenders demand. CVs were scattered across folders, formatted inconsistently, impossible to search, and requiring hours of manual work every time a new tender landed.
This is a common issue in CV management for consulting firms. As organisations grow, expertise becomes harder to access, even when it already exists internally.
After implementing Sprint CV – Enterprise CV Manager, SWORD Belgium transformed the way their bidding, recruitment, and delivery teams operate. The result: faster response times, fewer errors under pressure, and a direct competitive advantage in one of Europe’s most demanding procurement markets.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Context: Selling Expertise in the European Procurement Market
- The Problem: A CV Infrastructure Built for a Simpler World
- The Selection Decision: Why an ATS Is Not the Answer
- What Changed After Sprint CV: Three Concrete Benefits
- CVs as a Business Asset, Not as Documents
- The Bigger Picture: Agility in a Shifting Market
- The ROI Conversation: When Tool Cost Becomes Irrelevant
- Closing Thoughts: What This Means for Consulting Firms Still Working Manually
- Summary
- Frequently Asked Questions
- About Sprint CV
The Context: Selling Expertise in the European Procurement Market
To understand why CV management is so operationally critical for consulting firms like SWORD, you first need to understand how the European institutions procurement market works.
Public buyers (the European Commission, the European Parliament, EU agencies such as Europol) issue calls for tender in which IT consulting companies compete to provide expert resources over multi-year framework contracts. These contracts can run into hundreds of millions of euros. DIGIT-TM (one of the Commission’s major IT framework) and ITS (the Parliament’s equivalent) are among the largest and most competitive in the European market.
The structure of this market is also evolving. The traditional cascade model, where suppliers were ranked and work was distributed accordingly, is being replaced by Dynamic Procurement Systems. Under this model, multiple vendors are admitted into a pool and must compete again in mini-competitions for each contract. This increases the frequency of bids and puts constant pressure on response times.
In practice, this shift changes the role of CV management in consulting firms. Each opportunity requires a fast, accurate, and compliant submission of consultant profiles, often in different formats and with strict requirements.
Toon Kockx, who has spent close to 15 years working with European institutions, describes the shift clearly:
“If you want to survive in the market of public procurement, you adapt or you die. (…) Either you find a way of making it work, either you disappear from the markets.”
In that environment, the speed and quality of your CV submissions is not a process detail. It is a strategic variable.
Why is CV management critical in European public procurement?
In consulting firms working with public tenders, CV management determines how quickly a team can identify relevant expertise and submit compliant profiles. Faster and more accurate submissions increase the chances of winning contracts.
The Problem: A CV Infrastructure Built for a Simpler World
SWORD Group is a large, multinational consulting firm. Managing competences across hundreds of consultants, spread across multiple countries and business units, creates a structural challenge that gets harder as the company grows.
Before Sprint CV, the reality was one that most consulting firms in the European market will recognise: internal systems designed for general operations, not optimised for profile management. Consultants’ CVs lived in folders: different formats, different languages, different layouts, some in PDF, some in Word, no consistent structure.
Kockx describes the situation before the change:
“Once you come to a certain size of company, (…) it’s very difficult to get a good view on all the expertise you have in-house. (…) If you have only 20 consultants, okay, you can easily keep track and you know everybody by heart. (…) But if you are having a large number of consultants spread over different countries, plus with some mobility as well — people coming, people going — it’s particularly difficult to keep track of that.”
The issue compounds further in the European institutions context because different institutions use different CV templates. The European Commission uses one format. The Parliament uses another. Framework contracts 1, 2, and 3 each have their own requirements. Multi-language requirements add further complexity: submissions for Flemish regional administrations must be in Flemish. For the Commission, it depends on the contract. Europass is required in some contexts but not others.
Every call for tender meant the bidding team had to manually extract, reformat, and compile dozens of CVs from scratch. There was no central source of truth for skills and certifications. There was no visibility across the organisation on who was available, what they were certified in, or how their profile matched the requirements of a specific call.
The consequences of that approach went beyond inefficiency:
“If you have to do everything manually in a call for tender, you will make an error at some point. And if you automate that part of the process, you are less prone to having errors.”
What is the main challenge in CV management for consulting firms?
The main challenge is visibility. As the number of consultants grows, firms struggle to identify who has the right skills, certifications, and experience. Without structured data, every tender requires manual work to rebuild that visibility.
The Selection Decision: Why an ATS Is Not the Answer
One of the more revealing parts of Toon Kockx’s account concerns what SWORD tried before Sprint CV. Like many firms of their size, they implemented an Applicant Tracking System: first an earlier solution, later Recruitee, which Kockx describes as a genuinely strong tool for recruitment process management.
But an ATS, however well-built, is designed for a different job.
“A tool does what it does best. In this case, it’s an ATS and it’s exactly what it is, an applicant tracking system. It’s a system that is ideal for tracking all of your recruitment processes. But what we were lacking is some additional power that is not standard foreseen in an ATS, because it’s also something that is very specific to the consulting business and very specific to working with public tenders.”
The fundamental gap is timing. An ATS comes into play once you have a position to fill and a candidate pipeline to manage. But in the European institutions market, before you can recruit, you must win the contract. And to win the contract, you need to submit compelling, compliant, well-formatted CVs of your existing consultants fast. This is where CV management for consulting firms becomes a separate capability:
“Before you can go start doing recruitment, you have to win contracts. And that’s a part that is not covered by a system like an ATS. It’s also something you can’t expect from an ATS. It’s not built for that.”
The two systems solve different problems. That clarity (separating CV management and talent intelligence from recruitment pipeline management) is what drove the decision to implement Sprint CV alongside, not instead of, the existing ATS.
Why can’t an ATS replace CV management in consulting firms?
An ATS manages candidate pipelines and recruitment workflows. CV management for consulting firms focuses on structuring, searching, and exporting profiles of existing consultants to respond to tenders. The two systems operate at different stages of the business process.
What Changed After Sprint CV: Three Concrete Benefits
Kockx frames the impact in direct, practical terms. When asked about the main benefits SWORD Belgium has experienced, he identifies them without hesitation.
1. A Measurable Gain in Productivity
The most immediate and most significant change was time. Tasks that previously required hours of manual effort, such as reformatting CVs, collating profiles, matching certifications to requirements, were either eliminated or radically compressed.
“The biggest advantage that we have seen until now is the immense gain of productivity. We won a lot of time because before there was lots of work that needed to be done manually, which first of all is not the most pleasant job to be doing. And that added a level of automation, freeing a lot of time from our team to dedicate to more fulfilling work.”
The ripple effect extended to the recruitment team itself. Before Sprint CV, the bidding process would pull recruitment staff away from their core work to help with CV formatting. That diversion is now gone.
“The recruitment team also worked together with the bidding team, making sure that all the CVs were properly done or properly formatted. All of that part is now cut from the process, which means they can now invest in finding more candidates for more positions.”
2. Real-Time Visibility Over In-House Competences
The second major benefit is strategic intelligence: the ability to know, at any moment, what skills, seniority levels, and certifications exist across the consultant base, and to use that knowledge to make fast, informed decisions about which tenders to pursue.
“There is a call for tender coming in in a specific domain, in a specific niche. We immediately have a snap picture of — okay, these are the number of people that we have in-house. These are the seniority levels that we have in-house. If there is a need for certain certifications, okay, they are all uploaded in the system. So we can quickly have a good view on whether or not we can be eligible for a call for tender or not — which is the very first step.”
Before this kind of visibility, bidding decisions were made with incomplete information. Teams would commit to a tender and then discover mid-process that they lacked a required certification or seniority level. Now, that assessment happens in minutes rather than days.
3. Multi-Template Compliance at Speed
The third benefit addresses the core operational challenge of the European institutions market: the proliferation of different CV templates and format requirements across different clients and framework contracts.
Sprint CV allows SWORD to maintain consultant profiles in a single structured system and export them in any required template format. Changing a template when a client updates their requirements, or when a new framework contract introduces a new format, does not require rebuilding profiles from scratch. It requires updating the template configuration in the system.
The practical impact of this capability is perhaps best illustrated by an example Marco shared during the conversation. A German consulting firm specialising in AWS solutions was invited to join a consortium and given 48 hours to provide CVs for 30 consultants in a specific German-language template they had never used before.
The template was sent to Sprint CV at 9pm. By 10pm it was live in the platform. By 11pm, all 30 CVs were exported and ready. The team spent the remaining 47 hours on strategy. They won the contract.
CVs as a Business Asset, Not as Documents
One of the more conceptually important points from Kockx’s account concerns how consulting firms should think about their CVs in the first place.
In most organisations, a CV is treated as a document: something stored in a folder, dug out when needed, reformatted for submission, then filed away again. That framing misses the point almost entirely for a consulting firm whose business model depends on the quality, credibility, and accessibility of its consultant profiles.
Our CEO Marco Pincho frames it directly:
“CVs are not just documents. They are assets. The experience of the people are your main asset, which then represents the expertise that you have. Those are kind of your products to win clients and to win contracts.”
Kockx extends the analogy:
“They are your showroom. If you walk into a car showroom and you want to buy a car, they always represent all the different models in a very shiny way — always cleaned up, always attractive. You want to make sure that you do the same with CVs because they are the core of your business. They are the first thing that the client will see. And they will give a very important image of what type of company they are dealing with.”
This reframing has practical consequences. If CVs are assets, they need to be maintained, updated, and presented with the same care as any other business asset. They need to reflect reality accurately and be formatted to the standards of the client receiving them. They need to be readily accessible to the people who need them, like bidding teams, delivery managers, senior directors making go/no-go decisions on tenders.
An organisation that treats CVs as documents will always be slower, less accurate, and less competitive than one that manages them as structured, queryable, exportable assets.
The Bigger Picture: Agility in a Shifting Market
The European institutions market is undergoing significant structural change. The shift from tiered cascade systems to Dynamic Procurement Systems increases the frequency and intensity of competition. DGTM3, the next iteration of the Commission’s major IT framework, is expected to introduce further changes to how contracts are awarded and managed.
For SWORD, this means that the ability to respond quickly, accurately, and consistently to tender requests is not merely an efficiency goal. It is a survival requirement.
“If you want to survive in the market of public procurement, you adapt or you die.”
The shift toward sovereign IT solutions, driven by European concerns over reliance on US cloud and software providers, is creating new opportunities for firms like SWORD that carry European DNA and European ownership. But capturing those opportunities requires organisations to be structurally ready: fast enough to respond, organised enough to submit compelling bids, and agile enough to pivot as requirements change.
CV management infrastructure for consulting companies sits at the base of that readiness. It is the operational foundation on which bidding capability is built.
A recurring theme in the conversation is the tendency of organisations to resist investment in tooling on the grounds of cost, while simultaneously underestimating the cost of not investing.
In CV management for consulting firms, that trade-off is particularly visible. The effort required to prepare, format, and validate CVs for each tender is often treated as part of normal operations, even when it consumes a significant amount of time across multiple teams.
Marco puts it plainly: people are a company’s largest cost. Anything that meaningfully improves the output or speed of skilled people delivers a return that dwarfs the cost of the tool enabling it.
Kockx’s conclusion on the matter is equally direct:
“If the return on investment is positive, you would be a fool not to do it. It’s like sticking to a wagon with horses while you have a self-driving car.”
The alternative, manual processes, repeated reformatting, teams halted whenever a major tender lands, carries a cost that rarely appears on a P&L but is felt every quarter.
“Keep doing it manually, because it gives the rest of us a competitive edge.”
That line was said with a degree of candour that comes from experience. In a market where speed of response and quality of submission are decisive, process infrastructure is not an overhead. It is a competitive variable.
What is the ROI of CV management in consulting firms?
The return comes from two areas. First, reducing the time spent on manual CV preparation and administrative work. Second, increasing the ability to respond to more tenders, with higher quality and consistency. Both directly influence how many contracts a firm can compete for and win.
Closing Thoughts: What This Means for Consulting Firms Still Working Manually
If you are a managing partner, head of delivery, or senior sales director at a consulting firm competing for large contracts (whether in the European institutions market or in any environment where clients dictate their own CV templates and procurement processes) the question is not whether this problem affects you.
The question is how much it is currently costing you, and what you intend to do about it.
Kockx’s advice to firms still managing CVs manually:
“Keep doing it, because it gives the rest of us a competitive edge. But no, in reality — if you are still doing these things manually, it’s like working with postal pigeons or faxes. At some point you have to keep up. You have to get efficient and to organise yourself around that. I can only advise the use of decent tooling in order to make sure that you maintain your competitive edge and that you do everything that you can to be as quickly and as speedy as possible in response time — not losing time with tasks that can be easily automated.”
Summary
CV management for consulting firms directly affects how quickly teams can respond to tenders and how competitive their submissions are. In the case of SWORD Group, manual CV processes limited visibility over internal expertise, slowed down tender preparation, and increased the risk of errors under pressure.
By implementing a structured approach to CV management, SWORD gained real-time visibility over consultant skills, reduced manual work, and significantly improved response times. This allowed their teams to focus on higher-value activities and compete more effectively in the European public procurement market.
The case highlights a broader shift: consulting firms that treat CVs as structured, accessible assets can respond faster, submit more consistent profiles, and increase their chances of winning contracts.
Frequently Asked Questions
CV management for consulting firms refers to how organisations structure, maintain, and use consultant profiles to respond to client requirements. It includes storing skills, certifications, and experience in a searchable format, and generating CVs that match specific client or tender templates. Sprint CV – Enterprise CV Manager is the leading SaaS in the domain of CV management systems for consulting firms.
In consulting firms, CVs represent the expertise being sold to clients. The ability to quickly identify the right consultants and submit compliant profiles directly affects how fast a firm can respond to tenders and how competitive those submissions are.
An ATS manages recruitment pipelines and candidate processes. CV management for consulting firms focuses on existing consultants, making their profiles searchable and ready for tender submissions. The two systems support different stages of the business.
Firms respond faster when consultant data is structured and centralised. Instead of searching through documents, teams can identify relevant profiles immediately and generate CVs in the required format without manual rework.
The main challenge is visibility. As organisations grow, it becomes difficult to track who has which skills, certifications, and experience. Without a structured system, each tender requires manual work to rebuild that visibility.
CV management affects both speed and quality. Faster preparation allows firms to respond to more opportunities, while consistent and compliant CVs improve how submissions are evaluated. Together, this increases the likelihood of winning contracts.
Consulting, recruitment and staffing firms that sell expert resources benefit the most, especially those working with large clients, public tenders, or multiple CV templates. The larger and more distributed the consultant base, the greater the impact.
With a structured CV management platform like Sprint CV – Enterprise CV Manager, new templates can be configured and used within hours. This allows teams to adapt quickly to new client requirements without rebuilding profiles manually.
The return comes from reduced manual work and increased capacity to respond to tenders. Teams save time on CV preparation and can focus on higher-value activities, while the firm improves its ability to compete for and win contracts.
About Sprint CV
Sprint CV – Enterprise CV Manager is a CV management platform, founded by Marco Pincho and built for consulting, recruitment and staffing companies that compete for complex, high-value contracts. Organisations use Sprint CV to structure their consultant profiles, maintain skills and certification data, and export compliant CVs in any template format, at the speed that competitive markets demand.
If you manage consultants and compete for contracts where your people’s profiles are your primary commercial asset, Sprint CV was built for your context. Book a demo to see how teams like SWORD respond to tenders faster and with greater consistency.
This case study is based on a recorded conversation between Marco Pincho, CEO of Sprint CV, and Toon Kockx, Business Unit Director Belgium, SWORD Group, conducted in March 2026. Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Watch the full interview bellow:
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