Skills Matching

The Skills Matching feature helps you identify how well your company's skills and team capabilities align with tender requirements. This guide explains how to use this tool to strengthen your proposals and identify potential skill gaps.

Understanding Skills Matching

In competitive tenders, having the right skills and expertise is often a critical factor in winning. Clients want to ensure that your team has the necessary capabilities to deliver the project successfully, and many tenders include specific requirements for team skills and qualifications.

Traditional methods of matching skills to requirements often involve manual comparison and subjective assessment, which can be time-consuming and inconsistent. This approach may miss important skill gaps or fail to highlight your team's strengths effectively.

Zen AI's Skills Matching transforms this process by:

• Automatically identifying required skills in tender documents
• Matching these requirements with your company's declared skills
• Providing a gap analysis for missing or weak skill areas
• Prioritizing key skills based on client emphasis
• Suggesting team compositions that maximize your strengths

This capability helps you put forward your strongest team for each opportunity and identify areas where you might need to bring in additional expertise.

Prerequisites for Skills Matching

Before you can use the Skills Matching feature effectively, you need to prepare your company profile with detailed information about your team's skills:

1. Set up your company profile

   Navigate to the Company section and ensure you've entered your company details and core competencies.

2. Add team members and their skills

   Create detailed entries for your team members in your company profile, including:

   • Professional qualifications and certifications
   • Years of experience in relevant fields
   • Specific skills and expertise areas
   • Notable achievements and project contributions
   • Languages spoken for international projects

3. Define skill levels

   For each skill, indicate the level of expertise:

   • Basic knowledge
   • Advanced
   • Expert
   • Certified (where applicable)

The quality of your skills matching depends directly on the completeness and accuracy of your team skills data. The more detailed and specific your skill profiles are, the better the matching results will be.

Accessing Skills Matching

To match your company's skills with tender requirements:

1. Navigate to your Opportunities dashboard
2. Select the opportunity you want to analyze by clicking on its name
3. In the opportunity details view, click on "Match Skills" in the Analysis section of the sidebar
4. Click the "Find Matching Skills" button to initiate the analysis

The skills matching feature is integrated with the opportunity analysis workflow, making it easy to move from understanding requirements to identifying the right team for the project.

Understanding the Results

The skills matching analysis gives you actionable insights about your team's fit for the opportunity:

With the skills matching results, you can:

Identify Your Strongest Team Members

Quickly see which employees have the most relevant skills for the tender requirements, helping you assemble your optimal project team.

Spot Skill Gaps

Identify areas where your team may need additional support, allowing you to plan for partnerships, training, or recruitment before submitting your proposal.

Make Strategic Decisions

Use the coverage assessment to make informed decisions about:

• Whether to pursue the opportunity
• Which team configuration gives you the best chance of success
• Where to invest in skill development
• Potential partners to complement your capabilities

Strengthen Your Proposal

Leverage the analysis to highlight your team's strengths in your proposal and demonstrate how you'll address any skill gaps, increasing client confidence in your ability to deliver.

Using Skills Matching in Your Proposal

The skills matching analysis provides valuable insights for your proposal development:

1. Team Selection: Use the analysis to select the optimal team for the project, focusing on members with the strongest match to requirements.

2. CV Customization: Highlight the specific skills and experiences that align with tender requirements in team member CVs.

3. Gap Mitigation: Develop strategies to address any identified skill gaps, such as partnerships, training, or recruitment.

4. Proposal Narrative: Use the matching insights to craft a compelling narrative about why your team is uniquely qualified for the project.

5. Resource Planning: Ensure that team members with critical skills are available during the project timeline.

For example, if the analysis shows that your team has strong technical skills but limited domain knowledge in a specific area, you might:

• Partner with a domain expert
• Highlight transferable experience from similar domains
• Propose a knowledge acquisition phase in your project plan
• Emphasize your team's ability to quickly learn and adapt

Best Practices for Skills Matching

To get the most value from the Skills Matching feature:

• Maintain comprehensive skill profiles: Regularly update team member skills and experience to ensure accurate matching.

• Be specific about skill levels: Differentiate between basic knowledge, advanced skills, and expert capabilities for more precise matching.

• Include certifications and qualifications: These formal credentials can be important differentiators in many tenders.

• Consider soft skills: Don't focus only on technical capabilities; management, communication, and methodological skills are often equally important.

• Review and refine: Always review the automated matching results and refine them based on your knowledge of your team's true capabilities.

• Address gaps proactively: When gaps are identified, develop a clear strategy for addressing them rather than ignoring them.

Troubleshooting

If you're not getting good skills matches:

• Check your team profiles: Ensure they're complete and up-to-date with specific skills rather than general descriptions.

• Review the tender requirements: Make sure the system has correctly identified the required skills from the tender documents.

• Consider synonyms and alternative terms: Your team profiles might use different terminology than the tender documents for the same skills.

• Add missing skills: If you know team members have relevant skills that aren't appearing in the matches, update their profiles to include these skills.

Most skills matching issues can be resolved by improving the quality and completeness of your team skill data or ensuring accurate requirement extraction.

By leveraging Zen AI's Skills Matching, you can quickly identify the optimal team for each opportunity, address potential skill gaps before they become issues, and present your capabilities in the most compelling way possible. This strategic approach to team composition can significantly increase your win rate for competitive tenders.