Show Notes
thenowwhat.co.ukThis week's episode is less polished structure, more honest reflection. I'm walking through some recent experiences from my own job search — the kind of things that happen when you're in the middle of redundancy and nobody's handing out a manual.
I answer questions about what's been hardest lately, how interviews have gone (and the specific exhaustion that comes from smiling at a webcam while three people take notes), what motivation actually looks like when your laptop autocompletes "jobs in" before you've finished typing, and how to handle rejection emails that all start with "thank you for your interest."
No neat solutions here. Just the reality of what this phase looks like when you stop pretending you've got it all figured out.
If you're navigating your own unemployment or career transition, head to theinvisiblequeue.co.uk to connect with others going through the same thing.
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.