Show Notes
"Fast-paced environment." "We're like a family." "Hit the ground running." These could sound like reasons to apply - they could also sound like reasons to close the tab.
Job ads are marketing copy. They're written to sell you on a role, not to tell you what it's actually like to work there. Somewhere between the free fruit and the ping-pong table that nobody's allowed to use, there are phrases doing a lot of heavy lifting to make chaos sound like culture.
In this episode, I break down some of the corporate red flags hiding in plain sight in job descriptions — what they may actually mean, why companies use them, and the questions you can ask in interviews to find out what's really going on before you sign anything.
Because redundancy already knocked your confidence once, your next role should be better than the last one.
To connect with the show please visit thenowwhat.co.uk If you're navigating redundancy and want practical support that actually gets how messy this bit is, head to theinvisiblequeue.com
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.