What Makes a Perfect RFP Writer?

The skills that make an RFP writer effective are not the ones a portfolio shows. Compliance discipline, the ability to extract usable detail from busy experts, and writing to a scoring rubric rather than to impress decide outcomes far more than prose quality — and none of the three are visible in a polished sample.

This guide is about judging a writer once you have decided you want one, whether that is an internal hire or an external contractor. If you are still weighing whether to bring anyone in, should I hire an RFP writer covers that decision first.

What Should You Actually Be Testing For?

Why Isn't Strong General Writing Enough?

Because the job is structurally different. Most writing tries to hold a reader who is free to stop. Proposal writing tries to let an evaluator find and score an answer quickly, under time pressure, alongside a stack of competing submissions, against criteria published in advance.

That inverts several instincts good writers have. Repetition is a virtue when each section must stand alone for a different reviewer. Following the solicitation's own structure beats a more elegant one. And the answer belongs in the first sentence, not built toward.

Skilled generalists frequently produce responses that read beautifully and score poorly, because the answer is there but buried. Watch for that specifically when reviewing samples.

How Do You Run a Useful Work Sample Test?

Take a real solicitation — a closed one you bid on, or any open public RFP — and set a short, paid exercise. Two tasks tell you almost everything:

1. Produce a compliance checklist from this solicitation. You are watching whether they find requirements buried in exhibits and attachments, notice the question deadline and any mandatory meeting, and catch page limits and format rules. A writer who returns a thin checklist reads for style first — which is the wrong order.
2. Answer one requirement using only these facts. Supply a short factual brief and ask for a single response section. Then check three things: does it answer the question actually asked, can you find the answer in the first two lines, and did they add anything you did not give them?

That third check is the important one. A writer who invents a plausible-sounding certification or inflates a staffing number in a test exercise will do the same in a document you sign. In procurement that is not a stylistic issue — it is a claim you can be held to for the life of the contract.

Pay for the exercise and keep it under two hours. Good candidates decline unpaid speculative work, and you want the ones with that standard.

What Should You Ask in the Interview?

• "Walk me through a bid you lost and why." The single most revealing question. You want specific diagnosis — scored low on past performance, priced above the range — not "the incumbent had it locked up." Anyone with real volume has losses and has examined them.
• "How do you get an answer from an expert who won't reply?" Listen for concrete tactics — narrow questions, booked time at kickoff, drafting a version for them to correct rather than asking them to write. Vague answers about "good communication" mean they have not solved this.
• "What do you do first when a solicitation lands?" The answer should involve reading the whole thing including attachments, and building a requirements matrix. If they start at the executive summary, that is a tell.
• "What would make you recommend we don't bid?" A writer willing to talk you out of a poor-fit pursuit is worth considerably more than one who bills for every response regardless.
• "How do you use AI in your process?" There is a right shape of answer: useful for summarizing solicitations and drafting from approved content, never for generating factual claims. Both "not at all" and "for everything" are worth probing.

What Are the Warning Signs?

• A win rate quoted without context. Ninety percent means nothing without knowing the sector, the competition and whether they chose which bids to count.
• No curiosity about your business. A proposal argues why you specifically should win. Anyone ready to write before understanding your differentiators is planning to use a template.
• Compliance treated as clerical. If forms and certifications are described as something someone else handles at the end, they have not seen a strong bid disqualified over an unacknowledged addendum.
• Only beautiful samples. Ask to see a response to a rigid, ugly, form-driven solicitation. That is what most public work looks like, and it is harder to do well than a designed capability brochure.

Does It Differ for an Internal Hire?

The skills are the same; the weighting shifts. For an employee, weight relationship-building and library discipline more heavily — they will spend years persuading colleagues to give them information, and the content library they maintain compounds into an asset the business owns.

For a contractor, weight sector fluency and speed to productive. They will not get months to learn your business, so how much they already understand about your buyers matters more than their potential to learn it. If you have not settled that question, in-house versus outsourced works through the trade-off.

Test Them Against a Real Solicitation

The work sample test only works with a genuine document, ideally one resembling what you will actually bid on. Bid Banana lets you filter open federal, state and local solicitations by industry, so you can pull something representative in a couple of minutes.

Happy to be tested this way ourselves. Schedule a free consultation with The Bid Lab, call 1-844-4BIDLAB, or email respond@thebidlab.com.