Show Notes
Redundancy has a way of turning perfectly normal days into something… slightly loaded. Suddenly you’re measuring time differently, your inbox has the power to ruin an afternoon,and “being proactive” can become a full-time personality. In this episode, I’m sharing a few things I’d genuinely like to tell the version of me at the very start of it — not big inspirational slogans, but the practical, unglamorous truths that would’ve saved me a lot of stress. We get into why networking is less 'selling yourself' and more 'finding your people', why clarity matters more than volume in the job hunt, how resilience has to be sustainable (not heroic), what rejection does to your confidence over time, and how parenting shifts when you’re physically present but mentally elsewhere. If you’re in that in-between stage — doing loads, still feeling behind, trying to stay calm while everything feels slightly uncertain — this will help you feel less alone and a bit more steady. And if you know someone who’s just entered the redundancy era, this is a very solid “send without awkward caption” episode.
More from Now What? - Life after redundancy
After the best part of a year and somewhere north of a hundred applications, I've been offered a role and this episode is the honest version of what that actually feels like, recorded a while before I've even started, with none of the hindsight smoothed in yet.
There's a particular kind of unlucky where one thing goes wrong and you can just about laugh about it. Then there's Dan Roberts's 2025, where the wrong things queued up to take turns; right up until the week he finally caught a break and then redundancy turned up two days later like it had been waiting for an invite.
Most people navigating redundancy have spent years being good at their jobs. The doing was never really the problem. The bit that catches people out is the presenting — interview panels, networking rooms, video calls with recruiters — where suddenly you have to articulate your value out loud, to strangers, in real time, without your brain quietly filing everything under unavailable.
Most people treat a recruiter like a fire extinguisher — ignore it completely until something's on fire, then hope it works first time. In this episode, I'm joined by Neil Johns, Director at Merje, a specialist recruitment business working with everyone from startups and FinTechs through to national banking groups and global organisations, to find out what the job search actually looks like from the other side of the desk.
The salary conversation is one of the most anxiety-producing moments in any job search — and when you're coming from redundancy, it's even more loaded. Your last salary exists but it may not reflect what the market currently pays. The pressure of needing a role changes what you're willing to say out loud. And the advice available is either negotiation-bro overconfident or so hedged it's useless.