Run A CV And Interview Practice Night
Spend an evening rewriting each other's CVs and running mock interviews - the help that's normally expensive or unavailable.
- Cost
- Free
- Time
- 90-120 min
- People
- Small Group (3-6), Large Group (7+)
- Where
- Home, Café
- Bring
- Laptops and printed CVs
Why this matters
Career help is distributed almost entirely through networks, which is precisely why it compounds existing advantage - people with well-connected friends get feedback and introductions, and people without them don't. Practising an interview once before doing it for real measurably changes performance, and it costs nothing except a few people's evening.
How to do it
Get a group together, bring laptops and printed CVs, and work on each other's job applications properly.
A structure that works: - Start with CVs. Swap with someone who doesn't know your industry - if they can't tell what you actually do within thirty seconds, neither can a recruiter. - Then cover letters, which almost everyone writes badly and nobody gets feedback on. - Then mock interviews in pairs, with a third person watching and taking notes. Use real questions from an actual job posting. - Finish with LinkedIn profiles and, if anyone's up for it, practising how to ask for an introduction.
What makes the feedback useful: - Be specific and structural, not encouraging. "This says you're a team player but never shows it" helps; "looks great" doesn't. - Have people say their answers out loud rather than describing them. The gap between what you plan to say and what comes out is the whole point of practising. - Look for buried achievements. Most people massively undersell themselves and need someone else to spot it. - Let whoever has hiring experience lead that section - they know what actually gets read.
Extend the invitation beyond your immediate group: a neighbour's teenager, someone recently made redundant, a friend of a friend changing careers. Those are the people for whom this is worth the most and who are least likely to ask.