Thanks for the comment. Very helpful and hopefully will be of use to other people. I’m going to change my CV over the course of the crits so people can see its progress and get some ideas for their own.

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- your Cv should be one page. No more. If I have to turn the page I won’t. I want what I need on one page.
- Don’t ‘design’ your CV. White space equals wasted space equals waste of time
- Your CV should tell what you HAVE done, so should have achievements under the roles. Keep the description of the roles as short as possible
- make the achievements as tight, pithy and specific as you can
- don’t ask me to got to a website to get your cuttings
- don’t say your references are ‘by request’. that means you will have to call them after I’ve asked for them.
- Pre-prep them, and make sure they know what you want them to say about you. Make sure you thank them
- don’t produce a ‘general’ CV. Make it as specific for the job as you can.
- Work hard on your CV, but 100 times harder on your interviewing skills. The purpose of the CV is to get you an interview. The objective of the interview is to get an offer.
- Too many people walk into the interview horribly unprepared. In short, they blow it.
- Practice, practice practice. Prepare yourself with others, in front of a camera, recording yourself. Listen back to how you sound.
- As well as being prepared, show some energy! Smile, say hello with some spark. – I’m afraid it can take as little as 30 seconds to know someone isn’t going to get a job. It takes longer to work out whether they should. So work on your first impression.
- Remember you are being assessed at every step – even how you speak to the receptionist can get back to the interviewer!
- Be graceful, be nice, but be persistent about chasing and about following up.
- I want to have people who connect to people, who will deliver and who will keep going when the going gets tough.

I hope that helps. Good luck. You have my email.

Thanks for the comment. I can’t really say what area he works in as he wanted to remain anonymous. Suffice to say it was not consumer. He is the editor however.

Yes, I suspect a fashion mag would be more sympathetic but I want to get a range of comments and this editor did raise some interesting points which may be of use to other people.

I did think about the dangers of writing, as you put it, a kiss-and-tell about US Vogue in terms of frightening other magazines off but the piece was very carefully put together and legaled to within an inch of its life. I don’t think I would do it now and I would never write about a publication I was working for but at the time it was the one thing only I could write about and it launched my freelance career.

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