Show Notes
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.
The specific flinch of not trusting good news, what it costs to lose a routine you didn't choose but got attached to, and what genuinely felt different about this last stretch of interviews compared to the ones before it — including the one piece of real feedback that changed how I answered questions from that point on.
This also closes out season one. Season two returns in a couple of weeks on a fortnightly cadence, with a shift in focus towards the voices of people still navigating this in real time, and specialists who can bring perspectives I don't have on my own and topics that I know have supported me as I navigated my own journey.
Thank you for forty episodes of company — genuinely.
To connect with others on this journey, visit https://theinvisiblequeue.co.uk/
To connect with the show visit https://thenowwhat.co.uk/
More from Now What? - Life after redundancy
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.
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.