Show Notes
thenowwhat.co.uk When redundancy happens, the spotlight lands on one person. But the uncertainty doesn't stay in one lane. It spreads into finances, into plans, into the people sharing the same space and nobody really warned them in advance. This episode looks at what redundancy actually does to the people around you and what it's like to be on the receiving end of someone else's wobble when you've got your own stuff going on. What good support looks like in practice, why asking for help feels harder than it should and how to stop the people who love you most from quietly running out of road.If redundancy has affected your household — whether you're the one job hunting or the one watching someone you love do it — this episode is for you.
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.