The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is looking for an exceptional candidate to join as a Senior Bid Manager in the Growth team. You will lead all aspects of our competitive bidding activities in the UK office, delegating to others when necessary - and will play a key role in ensuring the Growth Team delivers on its goal of enhancing BIT’s new-business capabilities and competitive bid conversion. 

This newly created role is an opportunity to further shape and lead BIT’s recently created competitive bidding team. BIT’s bidding capabilities are a central part of our growth strategy and this role is a chance for a commercially driven candidate to introduce bid-winning skills and experience that will drive the successful conversion of more of the socially impactful work we want, and need, to win. The successful candidate will bring a competitive edge as well as sharing these skills with the wider team to build on and enhance our overall bidding abilities.

About the Behavioural Insights Team

BIT is a global leader in the application of behavioural science to inform public policy and tackle societal challenges. The then Prime Minister created BIT in 2010 and in February 2014 we became a social purpose company, jointly owned by the Cabinet Office, Nesta (an innovation charity) and our employees.

 BIT works with governments around the world in almost every area of policy. Whilst the subject and output of our projects varies considerably, there are common threads: we try to understand the contexts in which people make decisions; we notice small details; we find out what has and hasn’t worked before; we come up with innovative ideas for solving policy problems and we test and measure everything we do as robustly as we can.

As well as displaying professional excellence, BIT selects staff on the basis of our company values: always prioritising social impact; empiricism and humility; fresh thinking, collaboration; and public service.

Roles and Responsibilities

As BIT expands our competitive bidding capacity, we are creating the Senior Bid Manager role to own and drive forwards enhanced management of our competitive tenders.  Leading the Bidding team, you will be responsible for the oversight of BIT’s approach to competitive bidding in the UK. You will also be expected to lead our response to a selection of larger and strategically significant competitive tenders. The bidding team will not lead on all competitive bids that are open at any one time, therefore it will be your responsibility to ensure that the team’s resources are focused on the right opportunities, as well as managing internal stakeholders. 

In this role you will be expected to work closely with the Growth Manager and the wider Growth Team, as well as senior and principal advisors across all of our policy areas. You will have direct management of the Growth Team resources with the possibility of increasing the size of the bidding team depending on performance. Bringing experience, knowledge and a bid winning flair to the team is key, these skills should be seen as resources that you can instill to senior and principal advisors across BIT.

As Senior Bid Manager, the successful candidate will be responsible for:

• Specialising in the writing & continued improvement of high scoring copy for competitive bids;

• The project management and production of high quality, competitive bid responses, through all stages of the end-to-end bid lifecycle - for a segment of the competitive tenders;

• Overseeing Growth QAs for a large segment of bids;

• Organising post mortem RFP sessions to create and share feedback and guidance;

• Improving and enhancing BIT’s bidding process, ultimately resulting in increased success rates; and

• Working closely with the Growth Manager to ensure best of class RFP content and knowledge is well curated and shared to all relevant stakeholders.

Skills and experience

The Behavioural Insights Team brings people together with different skill-sets.  You must be able to demonstrate a balance of skills across those listed below, but we do not expect you to be as strong in all areas.

Essential

• Experience leading successful Public and Private Sector competitive tenders, ideally working across cross-functional and remote teams;

• Exceptional written and verbal communication; strong analytical and summarised writing/editing skills, demonstrated through past experience with RFP answering;

• Strong communicator and interpersonal skills - able to communicate appropriately to staff at all levels;

• Strong project management skills and experience;

• Effective and proven organisational and prioritisation skills to meet multiple deadlines;

• A keen sense of personal impact - a courteous, diplomatic yet (when needed) assertive manner when dealing with partners;

• Strong leadership alongside a clear focus on collaborative working, including supporting team members to develop their own skills and expertise;

• Strong IT skills (Google Drive, MS Office);

• Comprehensive understand and knowledge of the legal aspects of bidding, including contracting, compliance and privacy; and

• A commercially hungry and tenacious attitude, with equal amounts of personability that will be required to build strong relationships with internal stakeholders. 

Desirable

Finally, it would be desirable if you have:

• Experience of pitching to as part the final stages of a competitive bidding process;

• Experience of working with multiple bidding frameworks; and

• Worked with wider teams in a bidding coaching role to improve bid management techniques and skills.

Please note:

If you do not already hold the right to work in the UK and/or require sponsorship in order to continue working here, you should think carefully before applying. This is because we will be unable to sponsor you unless there is no other suitably qualified settled worker available to fill the role or your current immigration status means that the resident labour market test will not apply in your case.

To find out more about the organisation and the type of people who work in the team visit: www.bi.team

The Behavioural Insights Team is committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity and is determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.

Some of the personal data you provide to Applied when you apply for a role with The Behavioural Insights Team will be passed on to The Behavioural Insights Team for the purposes of (a) reviewing your application; (b) inviting you for interview; and/or (c) offering you a job and getting you set up as an employee/contractor. For full details on how BIT collects and uses your personal data please visit our website - https://www.bi.team/bit-global-recruitment-privacy-notice/ 

If your application is not successful, any personal data provided to us by Applied (including any personal data relating to equal opportunities monitoring as set out above) will be retained by The Behavioural Insights Team for no longer than 6 months after the application deadline has passed (other than in exceptional circumstances where we may need to retain your personal data for longer), at which point your personal data will be securely deleted. We only keep your information for that period in order to allow us to comply with relevant legal obligations.