Clevermind: a skills dossier ready in 1 minute, so no RFP gets missed

I have been an IT business manager at Clevermind for a little over five years. I started in finance as a financial analyst, then moved into this role in 2019. Today I support about thirty consultants on IT topics, from web and mobile development to data and AI.

Clevermind has been around since 2013 and now has more than 200 consultants. Our real strength is the network. Before we even look at job boards, we tap our network first. That is how we reach off-market candidates, people who are sometimes missing from LinkedIn or Malt. It sets us apart, and it also shortens the time it takes to present consultants to clients.

Before Better⁠folio, we did everything by hand. We asked the consultant to rework their dossier, often by hand, then we received a PDF that we had to turn into Word, rework, restyle, with a lot of copy-paste. It was heavy, and frankly not very clean.

In the end it ate a huge amount of time. On my own activity, I estimated that it took me about ten hours a week just to manage skills dossiers.

First, I really like that Better⁠folio is built into Boond Manager, our CRM/ATS. I do not need to go to another platform, so it stays fluid inside our stack. Everything is available in the environment I already work in. Staying inside Boond made adoption much easier for the sales team.

Then creating a dossier became extremely fast. Where it used to take nearly an hour to produce a skills dossier by hand, today it takes between 30 seconds and 1 minute.

There is also the co-creation with consultants, which is genuinely valuable. It puts them in charge of their own presentation. They can enrich the dossier for a given client need, highlight certain missions, and adapt the content. If a need is about React or Next.js, we can rework the most relevant missions together to make the profile stronger.

Finally, having everything centralized changes a lot. Once the dossier is created, it is immediately available and shareable, which makes work between salespeople much easier. It is a precious database that is, and will remain, a real asset.

The first gain is obviously time. We went from very manual work, hours every week, to a near-instant process.

The second gain is commercial speed. On a competitive market, being able to send a clean, adapted dossier quickly really matters. So we increase our chances of being shortlisted on some RFPs, with faster and better dossiers.

The third gain is for the consultants themselves. They save time, especially when they are already on a mission and do not have the energy to rebuild a dossier by hand at the end of the day. Their feedback has been very positive. One of them even asked if the tool had been built in-house, it felt so well integrated into how we work.

Yes, clearly. I recommend it 100%. It is a game changer in this job. It lets you go fast, work better with consultants, keep information in one place, and stay reactive on files where every minute counts.

I would go further: every IT services firm should adopt it to move faster on skills dossiers and stay competitive on a market where execution speed is essential.

Rolling it out with the teams happened very naturally. Skills dossiers were a real issue for us, because they sit at the center of our day-to-day. We needed a tool that would save time, while staying simple and easy for the whole team to adopt.

From the start, Anicet supported us well, with a presentation call to make onboarding easier. That has stayed a real strength over time: we talk with him regularly, he is always available, very reactive, and he listens to our feedback and our questions.

Adoption by the team was very fast. Feedback was positive right away: the tool is intuitive, simple to use, and everyone found their bearings quickly. We also like that Better⁠folio keeps evolving based on how people actually use it, which makes the daily experience even simpler.

Today about ten people use Better⁠folio, and it is fully part of how we work. The best signal is probably the team's feedback: we save so much time that we can barely remember how we used to do it.