Bring One Real Job Advert: How to Prepare for Saturday’s Application Clinic
The best preparation for a job-search clinic is not a list of questions. Bring your current CV and one vacancy you would genuinely submit today.
Tomorrow's Remote Job Application Clinic is not designed as a long lecture. The useful unit is one real application: a real CV beside a real vacancy, with a decision about what should happen next.
Bring the CV you are actually using
Do not tidy it for the session. Do not create a new version tonight because you are embarrassed by the old one. The current document tells us what the market has actually been seeing.
If you have several versions, bring the one attached to your most recent applications.
Bring one job advert you would genuinely accept
Not a dream-company vacancy you are not eligible for. Not a random LinkedIn post. Choose one role where the location, level and function make sense.
The advert lets us test three things at once: whether the role is truly open to you, whether your evidence matches it, and whether the application should be tailored or abandoned.
Know your last thirty days
You do not need a perfect tracker, but come with rough counts for applications and interviews. Ten applications with two interviews tells a very different story from eighty applications with none.
If you know where the search is breaking, the session can spend time on the fix rather than on reconstructing the problem.
Write one question
Make it specific. 'How do I get a remote job?' is too large. 'I am targeting customer success, I have sent 18 applications, I have had no interviews, and this is the CV I used — what is the first thing you would change?' is answerable.
What we will not do
We will not promise a job date, invent experience for a CV or tell everybody to buy Cohort 10. If your first fix can be done free, you should leave knowing that.
The session is most useful when you arrive with evidence, not when you arrive hoping for motivation.