Show Notes
Small talk is meant to be harmless. Weather chat. Mild nodding. A quick “busy week?” and everyone carries on with their life. But in redundancy it can feel like a contact sport. Because one minute you’re making conversation at “the things” (kids clubs, dog walks, community stuff, awkward queues) and the next someone drops the trapped question: 'So… what do you do?' In this episode I unpack the unspoken social contract of small talk and why redundancy makes the usual script feel loaded. We’ll cover: Why 'what do you do?' can feel like a landmine and the three ways people answer it (ghost job, honest answer, humour smoke bomb)
Forced optimism (often genuine, sometimes… not what you need in that moment)
Oversharing, and why 'how are you?' is basically code for 'please say fine'
Then I share a simple redundancy specific tactic: pre building one sentence you’re comfortable with, plus a few practical small talk tips you can use anywhere — including the days you’d rather throw a social smoke bomb and ninja roll your way to the biscuits. And if you’re asking yourself now what, you’re in the right place.
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.