How to Work With a Recruiter (Before You Actually Need One) - with Neil Johns, Merje
Now What? - Life after redundancyShow Notes
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.
We get into the patterns Neil sees regularly — the habits that quietly work against candidates, what a CV does and doesn't tell a recruiter and why the people who tend to do well are usually the ones who built the relationship before they needed it.
If you're in redundancy, back on the job market, or just keeping an eye on things, this'll be worth your time.
Find out more about Merje at https://www.linkedin.com/company/merje-ltd/
Find support from others navigating redundancy: https://theinvisiblequeue.co.uk/
Contact the show: https://thenowwhat.co.uk/
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.
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.
Redundancy has a way of doing something nobody really prepares you for. It doesn't just take the job it also dismantles the version of yourself that was built around it. Your title, the structure, the sense of purpose that came with knowing what you did and being good at it. And then one day, someone asks what you do, and you're not entirely sure how to answer.