How to Build a Statement of Qualifications That Gets You on the Shortlist

Picture the person on the other side of your qualifications package. They have a scoring sheet, eight submissions and one afternoon blocked on their calendar. They are not reading for pleasure, and they are not looking for reasons to like you. They are looking for proof that lines up with each row on that sheet, and they are moving fast. A statement of qualifications that earns a spot on the shortlist is written for that reader, and almost everything we do when we build one with a client comes back to making their afternoon easier.

Follow their scoring criteria, not your template

Most RFQs tell you exactly how you will be judged: relevant experience, team, approach, safety, references, and sometimes local or small business participation. The single easiest improvement most contractors can make is to organize the response in that same order, using the owner’s words as the headings. If a reviewer has to hunt through your standard template for the section that answers criterion three, you lose points you already earned. It sounds obvious, and yet we see it constantly, usually because the company has one master document that gets lightly edited for every pursuit.

One shortcut we see more and more is pasting the RFQ into Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT and asking it to write the response. These tools can genuinely help you outline, check that you answered every criterion, or tighten a paragraph that rambles. What they cannot do is tell an owner which superintendent ran the occupied hospital wing, what really happened when the steel was late, or why your preconstruction team caught the utility conflict before it became a change order. Reviewers can feel the difference, and a package that sounds like everyone else’s is exactly how you end up competing on price.

Fewer projects, told better, by the people who built them

The instinct is to show everything you have ever built. We gently push back on that every time. Five projects that match the owner’s building type, size, delivery method and complexity will beat fifteen loosely related ones, because the reviewer is trying to answer one question: have these people done this before? For each featured project, give the owner, location, size, value and delivery method, then spend most of your words on the two or three things that made it difficult and what your team did about them, in plain language. Finish with a result the owner actually cares about, like a schedule held through a brutal winter, a building kept open during work, or a budget brought back in line after a design change.

Then name which of the proposed team members worked on it. That line matters more than most firms realize. Owners notice when the featured projects were built by people who have since moved on, and a smart owner’s rep will ask about it in the interview. The team itself should sit at the center of the package. Resumes should be one page each, written for this pursuit, and led by relevant projects rather than years of experience. Add an org chart that shows who reports to whom on this specific job and how much of each person’s time is committed, because owners have all been burned by the senior person who appears at the interview and never again.

The approach section deserves the same care. Generic approach language is easy to spot, and it tells the reviewer you did not think hard about their project. Show you understand the real risks, whether that is an occupied campus, a tight urban site with no laydown space, a phased opening tied to a school calendar, or a utility constraint the design team has not solved yet. Two thoughtful paragraphs about this project are worth more than five pages about your general philosophy.

Build a library, so the next SOQ takes days instead of weeks

In the experience we have had since 2008, the firms that turn around strong qualifications quickly are the ones that keep their project stories, resumes and photos current all year long. The firms that struggle rebuild everything from scratch, under deadline, every single time. Most of the raw material already lives somewhere in your systems, in Procore project records, Autodesk Construction Cloud, a closeout folder in SharePoint or the superintendent’s camera roll. The trick is a simple, shared library everyone knows how to find, and a habit of capturing each project’s story at closeout while the team still remembers the details.

That same library feeds your website, your case studies, your newsletters and your social posts, so the effort pays you back many times. Our clients love not having to start from a blank page every time an RFQ shows up, and their marketing coordinators love getting their weekends back.

I can confidently say that Coral has been hands down the best decision we have ever made.

Ilia Rios, AIA, President / Managing Principal, V Architecture

A couple of questions come up often. How long should a statement of qualifications be? As long as the RFQ allows and no longer than it needs to be. If there is a page limit, spend it on relevance rather than volume. Should you include projects from before the current leadership team? Only if they are clearly relevant and someone on the proposed team can speak to them with confidence. Recent work by the people you are proposing is almost always stronger.

We build qualifications packages, and the content library behind them, for commercial contractors who want to land on more shortlists. If your next RFQ is around the corner, talk with us.