Last week, we were writing a tender produced by an organisation to buy a very specific piece of HR services. It was the first time in a long while that we had received such a specific and carefully written tender. It was a great pleasure to be able to write and submit the tender as it was so clear what the client wanted. We were able to comply easily with examples. The process operates a little bit like competency-based interviewing - if you have done it before, you can do it again, and therefore the more tightly written a tender is, the better we are able to deliver examples. They have word counts and every word matters.
This set us thinking about the way services - whether HR or otherwise - are bought by organisations. So often, a potential client does not actually know what they want and writes a tender accordingly. Often, they reach out for legal services, but many clients don’t realise what they are buying, and embark on a contract before realising that costs may be significantly higher than if they approach an HR consultancy. It is useful to shop around and ascertain hourly rates. It is also important to look at the length of the contract. Many organisations tie in clients for at least two years. We have made the decision not to tie in clients and allow the freedom to engage with us for as long or as short a period as the client wishes. This, in turn, affects costs.
I have noticed too, when I have been on the other side of the desk, that it is not always clear in a retainer arrangement what services you are buying and how much additional ad-hoc costs there are. The thing that is most confusing for the person writing the tender, and indeed ends up confusing the potential client, is a lack of clarity in the tender combined with a broad understanding of what the options can be. This means that the writer cannot give sufficient examples of what has been done in the past and which will become relevant to the future. Often, there is no scope for any creativity and presenting a series of options for possible solutions to a particular problem, as the client does not quite know the answer to the question: "What do we need?".
Sitting on our side of providing tender submissions, I would urge prospective clients to write a really detailed tender asking for solutions for the various areas in which there are challenges, rather than request a specific service or services that may not be relevant. Additionally, it is very important to find out what services are standard and which are add on. I have been caught by this in my pro bono work when I have assumed that the retainer covers a comprehensive range of services, but this is not always the case.
The same approach is absolutely true for recruitment and the use of psychometric profiling, which we will deal with in another posting.
If you need help buying services, it is worth investing time in writing the tender document and being crystal clear about the challenges on hand and leaving the writer of the tender to offer a range of possible solutions, timelines and costs.
