Key expert CVs for donor-funded proposals

Why key expert CVs carry so much weight

In consulting tenders the technical evaluation usually decides the winner, and the key experts are a large part of it. Under PRAG, the European Commission’s procurement rules for EU external action, the two main technical criteria for fee-based service contracts are the methodology and the CVs of the key experts. The standard evaluation grid gives the key experts between 40 and 60 of the 100 technical points, for at most four key experts, with the rest going to organisation and methodology, which our methodology guide covers.

Two rules then raise the stakes. Only tenders with an average technical score of at least 75 reach the financial evaluation, and the final ranking weights technical quality against price 80/20. As the price check in our bid/no-bid guide shows, technical points lost on weak CVs are very hard to win back with a lower price.

The rules quoted here come from PRAG 2021.1 and its standard tender documents for service contracts: the instructions to tenderers, the CV template and the evaluation grids. Check the edition named in your tender dossier. World Bank-financed and other donor tenders use their own forms and scoring, so always follow the request for proposals in front of you. The habits carry over: write to the profile, count experience honestly, and prove what you claim.

How evaluators score a key expert

The terms of reference describe a profile for each key expert, split into three criteria, each with a minimum and often a preferred requirement:

• Qualifications and skills: degrees, languages and specific skills.
• General professional experience: total relevant working experience, usually in years.
• Specific professional experience: experience in the exact field of the assignment, sometimes with a region or a number of projects.

In the standard grid each key expert is worth 20 points: 5 for qualifications and skills, 5 for general experience and 10 for specific experience. The contracting authority can change the split, so read the evaluation grid in the tender dossier before you choose who to propose. Three rules then decide the score:

1. Minimums are pass or fail. A key expert who misses the minimum on any criterion is rejected, and the whole tender with them, without a technical score.
2. Meeting the minimum earns about 60%. The guidelines for evaluators suggest that an expert who just meets the minimum for a criterion gets 60% of its points, and one who exceeds it gets between 61% and 100%, depending on by how much.
3. Only what the CV says, and what you can prove, counts. The committee considers only the professional experience written in the CV, and only diplomas and experience backed by documentary proof.

The committee can also check. Interviews are encouraged, in particular when an expert’s CV shows no relevant experience of EU projects; they are announced at least ten days ahead and usually held by phone or another remote tool. Checking past experience and references is standard practice, and if a check shows that a CV does not reflect reality, evaluators can deduct points.

Write the CV to the profile, in the required format

Use the CV template in the tender dossier, not your house format. In PRAG service tenders it is part of Annex IV to the draft contract, and it asks for the proposed role, education with dates and diplomas, language skills for reading, speaking and writing on the CEFR scale from A1 to C2, key qualifications, experience in the region, and a professional experience table: dates, actual working days, location, the company with a reference person, the position and a description.

Then write to the profile. Evaluators score against the wording of the terms of reference and must justify every score against it, so make each requirement easy to find: use the profile’s terms in the assignment descriptions, state roles and durations plainly, and put the most relevant assignments first. Never stretch the truth; reference checks exist to catch it.

Prove it

With the tender, include copies of the diplomas mentioned in each CV and employer certificates or references, or signed consultancy or employment contracts, proving the experience. Statements by the expert alone don’t count, and experience on a contract that was terminated for breach cannot be used. If proofs are missing, the committee may ask for them, but only for diplomas and experience among the requirements of the terms of reference.

If you propose a civil servant or other staff of the partner country’s public administration, or of an international or regional organisation based there, expect them to be accepted only if well justified. The tender must explain the added value they bring and prove that they are seconded or on personal leave.

Worked example: count experience the way evaluators do

Take a team leader worth 20 points (5, 5 and 10) with this profile in the terms of reference:

• Qualifications: at least a master’s degree in economics, public finance or a related field.
• General professional experience: at least 10 years; 15 preferred.
• Specific professional experience: at least 5 years in public financial management (PFM) reform; 8 preferred.

The expert has a master’s in economics and three assignments. Where you don’t have actual working days from timesheets or contracts, estimate them:

FTE days = months / 12 × 220 × time share

That is 10.5 years of general experience. The calendar span from January 2012 to June 2024 is 12.5 years, which is what experts tend to write at the top of a CV, but the evaluators will count 10.5. Here it still clears the minimum of 10. Against a 12-year minimum, the same expert would fail it and take the whole tender down.

Specific experience comes from the last two assignments: 1,210 days, or 5.5 years. But suppose the expert’s first draft described the part-time role only as “adviser to the Ministry of Finance”, with no word about reform. The committee can count only what the CV says, so on that draft the specific experience is 770 days, or 3.5 years: below the minimum, and the tender is rejected. Describing what the expert actually did in that role, for example preparing a medium-term expenditure framework, recovers two years of specific experience.

With every minimum met, the 60% guideline applies. Evaluators use judgement above the minimum; for illustration, assume they scale linearly from 60% at the minimum to 100% at the preferred level:

Now scale that up. If every key expert only just meets the minimums, a grid with 40 points for key experts gives them 24. To reach the 75-point threshold, organisation and methodology must then score 51 of 60, or 85%. Experts at 80% of their points bring 32, and the methodology needs 43 of 60, about 72%. Stronger experts don’t just add points; they lower the bar the rest of the proposal has to clear.

Exclusivity and availability: rules that reject whole tenders

For fee-based contracts, and for global price contracts that name key experts, each key expert signs a statement of exclusivity and availability, submitted with the tender. Non-key experts must not be asked to sign one. Go through it with each expert, because breaking it hurts you both:

• One tenderer only. If a key expert is proposed by more than one tenderer with their agreement, those tenders are rejected, and the expert is excluded from the procedure and may be excluded from other EU-funded contracts. The same applies to an expert who was involved in preparing the project.
• No clashing commitments. An expert whose input on another EU-funded project could be needed on the same dates must not be proposed as a key expert, and the dates in the statement must not overlap with a key expert commitment elsewhere.
• Parallel bids are allowed, if declared. An expert may appear in other tender procedures as long as the statement lists them. If they win elsewhere, they must tell you at once and accept the first engagement offered to them chronologically.
• Consent and honesty. Naming experts who have not agreed to take part, or hiding that a proposed expert is unavailable from the start date, can get the tender rejected as irregular and lead to exclusion from other EU-funded contracts.

Keep a register of every statement each expert signs, with the tender reference and the dates of availability promised, and check it before you add an expert to a new bid.

After award: availability checks and replacements

Winning does not end the CV work. In the standard timetable, notification of award can come up to 90 days after the tender deadline and signature up to 150. The notification asks the successful tenderer to confirm within 5 days whether each key expert is still available. If one is not, for example because they won another tender, you get one chance, within 15 days of the notification, to propose replacements:

• The replacement must meet every minimum requirement and would have scored at least as high in total as the expert they replace.
• They cannot be an expert proposed by another tenderer in the same procedure.
• If no acceptable replacement is proposed, the contracting authority may award the contract to the second-best tender or cancel the procedure.

Where the European Commission is the contracting authority, the partner country may also be asked to approve the key experts before signature, and can reject one only with substantiated, justified objections.

During the contract, the named experts are expected to do the work. A replacement needs the contracting authority’s written agreement (it has 30 days to reply), must have at least equivalent qualifications and experience, and cannot be paid a higher fee rate than the expert they replace. So before you name an expert, ask the uncomfortable question: if we win in five months, will you really be free?

Keep CVs bid-ready between tenders

Most CV problems are time problems: an expert rewrites their CV from memory the night before the deadline. Do the slow work once:

1. Keep a master record per expert with every assignment: dates, client, role, time share or actual days, location, a reference person and a plain description of the work.
2. Collect the proof once. Scan diplomas, language certificates and employer certificates or contracts when an assignment ends, not when a tender asks for them.
3. Tailor per tender. Start from the master record, select and order assignments against the profile, and fit the result to three pages in the dossier’s template.
4. Have the expert check and sign. They know what they did, and they are signing a statement of exclusivity and availability on the strength of it.
5. Check the register before you commit. Live statements, clashing dates and declared parallel bids, before the name goes into the proposal.
6. Learn from the evaluation. When you lose, ask how your key experts were assessed against the requirements. The win/loss analysis guide covers how to ask for a debrief and what to record.

Sources

• European Commission, Contract procedures for European Union external action: a practical guide (PRAG). The current edition and its annexes.
• European Commission, PRAG 2021.1 (PDF), the edition checked for this guide. Sections 3.2.3 (fee-based and global price contracts), 3.4.4 (award criteria), 3.4.10 (evaluation), 3.4.12 (availability, replacements and approval of key experts) and 3.4.13 (replacement during the contract).
• European Commission, PRAG 2021.1 annexes (ZIP). Service tender dossier: instructions to tenderers (B8b), terms of reference (B8e), key experts and CV template (B8h), evaluation grid (B8m1), tender submission form with the statement of exclusivity and availability (B8n), and the evaluator’s grid with its guidelines (B12a).