Keyword alerts are noise; a capability profile is a filter
Keyword alerts flood bid teams with notices that mention the right words and fit the wrong firm. Klarum models what a firm can deliver from its own documents and win history, then scores notices against that profile with reasons attached, which helps most where the history is richest and least where it is thin.
Limitations come first
A profile is only as good as the material behind it. A young firm with little win history, or one whose documents are thin or out of date, gets a weaker profile and weaker matches. A score is also a ranking aid, not a verdict: it tells a bid manager where to look first, and it will sometimes rank a notice too high or too low. We have not measured how often a bid team would have chosen differently.
Why keyword alerts fail
A keyword alert asks whether a notice contains certain words. Public procurement is written in broad language, so a firm that sets an alert for a topic receives every notice that touches it, whether or not the firm could ever deliver the work. The team learns to skim, then to ignore, and the notice that mattered sits unread in the same list as the rest.
The deeper problem is that the alert knows nothing about the firm. Even the classification a notice carries, the Common Procurement Vocabulary code[1], says what is being bought and nothing about who can deliver it. The alert cannot tell a notice the firm has won before from one it has never touched, or one that needs a certification it does not hold.
A profile built from the firm itself
We model what a firm can deliver from its own documents and its own win history, rather than from a list of keywords someone typed once. Past proposals, reference projects, CVs and the record of bids won and lost all say something about capability, and they say it more honestly than a marketing page does.
Notices are then scored against that profile, and each score carries its reasons. The method is set out in full in our article on match scores, and we do not repeat it here. What matters for this piece is the effect: the reason is shown, so a bid manager can read why a notice ranked where it did and disagree with it.
| Question | Keyword alert | Capability matching |
|---|---|---|
| What it knows about the firm | Nothing beyond the words | Documents and win history |
| What it returns | Every notice with a hit | Notices ranked by fit |
| Does it explain itself | No | Yes, with reasons attached |
| Where it struggles | Broad topics and noisy wording | Firms with little history |
Who this affects
Bid managers gain the most, because the decision of what to pursue is theirs and the first pass is where hours disappear. Directors gain a defensible answer to why the firm chased one notice and passed on another. Business development staff gain a shared basis for the go or no-go conversation, since the reasons are on the page rather than in one person's head.
The profile also keeps improving as the firm adds documents and records outcomes, so the filter follows the firm rather than freezing at whatever a team once configured.
What we would change first
We would make it easier for a firm to correct its own profile when it disagrees. A reason that is visibly wrong is the fastest way to find a gap in the underlying documents, and the correction should flow back into the next ranking.
The trade: less noise, more dependence on your own records
Capability matching swaps an alert that is cheap to set up and expensive to read for a profile that takes real material to build and is cheap to read. The exchange favours firms with a record to draw on. For everyone else it is a better ranking than keywords, with reasons you can check, and not a replacement for judgement.
References
- [1]Common Procurement Vocabulary. SIMAP, European Commission. The EU procurement classification. Its 45 divisions are the target vocabulary for derived sector codes.