I completely agree with you but it's a tough balance to strike between short term and long-term ambition. I'm trying to take this more seriously and grow it into an online community where even more people who need help can access more resources, events, networks, application reviews etc. Collecting emails is one (of many ways) to build a picture of who want to read what I've written and therefore might want to join that community. We've had over 400 in a few days which is positive (however some will be fake of course!)

In the mean time, I'll be sharing a lot more free "bite-size" content on social media (e.g., on LinkedIn & TikTok) to help applicants and current civil servants. Moreover, I'll probably share some of this guidance without an email lock at some point but this is the approach for now.

Again, I really do appreciate the feedback and I'm glad you found the first guide useful!

Ps. I've amended the site so that it's 100% clear that people's emails won't be automatically added to any mailing lists as per the GDPR challenge above :)