It is common for recruitment bids and tenders to have a pricing element, requiring careful consideration, planning and a methodology to complete correctly and win. However, it is common for many bidders to struggle with pricing a recruitment tender even though they run successful businesses.
We do not price bids, but from experience with thousands of bids and tenders, we will share some tips that may help guide your thinking.
Price to win – too many try and be fancy with pricing, trying to judge where last place will be to price higher. It never works.
Understand the evaluation – not only what proportion of the total evaluation pricing accounts for but how your score will be calculated. Is it the lowest price with the most marks, a median of all your prices, where you compared to other bidders’ median or an average of all your pricing compared to others? There are a range of methods and understanding them will influence your approach.
Do a profit and loss – do you know how much it costs to deliver the contract and what your expected turnover, margins and profit will be? After all, costs are considered, you need to know to bid at the levels that will make you money.
Have a walkaway point – you want to win, but not to the extent the contract is unprofitable. Having a P&L in place makes this easy.
Involve consultants – nothing worse than winning and realise consultants won’t work and fill at those prices. They can make better money with the same candidate elsewhere, so why bother with your shiny new contract?
Involve consultants from the initial stages, get their insights and share your thinking to agree on a consensus. A contract is worth nothing until jobs are filled, and candidates are placed.
Take your time – do not leave it until the last minute. Plan, plan, and plan. Understand how the spreadsheet works, any errors in there and how you need to complete it correctly.
Ask questions – if anything is unclear about how the pricing works, never guess, ask clarification questions. For example, are statutory costs included?
If you have a current or upcoming recruitment tender get in touch, and we’ll go over all the options for bid support.
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