BBC Radio – Facing redundancy can be frightening!

Corinne Mills joined Lorna Bailey to talk redundancy, the younger generation getting on the career ladder, AI in CV’s and Job Search and how to nail an online interview.

Listen again or read the transcript below:

Lorna Bailey

If you are under threat of or redundancy, how frightening is that right now?

I mean, what do you do? That first thought is the bills, how am I going to manage?

The job market has changed massively. Interviews are often online. AI is helping people write CVs. Applications and competition if you’ve got anybody of a younger age trying to get on the career ladder. We talked about the housing ladder, but also the career ladder is so hard. So, if you’re dusting off your CV for the very first time and heading into the jobs market, what do you need to know?

Corinne Mills is managing director of Personal Career Management with us this morning.

How do you go about writing a CV in 2026?

Do they look different from how they used to?

Are people using AI? What do you do?

Corinne Mills

Well, interesting enough, I think that they look better now because people are using AI. There are lots of statistics that are saying an overwhelming majority of candidates and now using AI. Use the technology. You don’t have to be very digitally savvy to use AI. You can just get some guidance. There’s free AI that you can use, whether it’s on Google version or Microsoft CoPilot. You can say to it “Help me write a CV” – fill in some of your details and it will give you a template that you can use. Now, like anything, you have to make sure it’s authentic. You have to make sure that it’s not some fictional version of what you’d like to be. But actually, it gives you a really good grounding. I do think part of the challenge that people have got now is that the CVs standards have gone up so well in terms of their presentation, but you’ve still got to compete, you’ve still got to give yourself a bit of an edge to get noticed.

Lorna Bailey

OK. And is AI being used to filter CV’s as well?

Corinne Mills

Every time you put your CV on a job board, whichever job board that you might use, technology will be filtering that. They will have some software bots and they’ll be saying, right, we need somebody with these particular technical skills, or this qualification, or have they worked in this sector. They’ll type that into the search function and then it’ll do the equivalent of a Google search. It’ll filter all of the CVs to see where those keywords are and then it will shortlist the ones that come up with those in their CV. So, in that respect, AI is no different to what’s been in place for 20-25 years. So don’t worry about that, if you know about it, you just use it in your favour.

Lorna Bailey

So you need to make sure that you’ve got those keywords. If you look at the job description, you need to make sure those words are in there, just to make sure that when that software runs through it, you are standing out for that initial sift.

Corinne Mills

Absolutely! Technology is more whizzy now but some of the things are still the same. Fundamentally, you are selling your skills and your capabilities and what you need to do is to be really clear about what your strengths are and what your skills are, much more so that just focusing on your job title.

Very often people think, well I did this job, but what you’ve got to do is look at the step beneath and say, well, actually in my job, what was I doing?

You might have been working with a technical piece of kit, for instance, but actually to learn how to use that technical bit of kit, you had to be good at learning. You had to be good at following a system.

You might be great at teamwork, perhaps you are a problem solver. These are the transferable skills, the things that underlie, what you actually did day-to-day, those are the things that are valuable and those are the things that you can apply to lots of different jobs. That gives you more options.

Lorna Bailey

How do you cope with online interviews? For a lot of people you’re doing online interviews that’s a bit weird, like rather than being face to face.

Are there some tips for getting that right?

Corinne Mills

It is very strange; you might be spending another 10 years of your life with these people who are on the screen in a 45 minute conversation. So it is a bit weird, but it is a sales activity.

Common pitfalls that people fall into is they think well is the interviewer’s job to bring out the best in me right? What if the interviewer didn’t ask the right questions, or maybe you haven’t really thought through or prepared your answers.

Most of the time you know, the questions they’re going to ask, they’re going to ask you – “Tell me about yourself?” To which you should tell them all the things about yourself that are relevant to the job that you’re applying for – so not your whole personal history, not you know what you could do if you left school and all the kind of all the detail of your current job, you cherry pick the things from all of your experience, the things that are most relevant. You’ve got to curate it a little bit.

And then the other questions will be “What are you good at?” “What are you less good at?” “What are you weaknesses?” “Why do you want this job?” “Tell me about a challenge that you faced?”

On the whole these are the kind of questions that come up, so you can prepare them. And you need to have evidence. You should have to have your examples ready.

The content of an online interview is the same as if you were being interviewed in person. It’s just what it is.

Lorna Bailey

It’s quite a different environment.

Corinne Mills

Yes, you have to be a little bit careful because they’re filming you in your space. If you’re going into an interview room, it’s their space.

You’ve got to be really careful about your background. If you’re doing it on a laptop, choose a virtual background, or be against a neutral wall. I know lots of people need to have interviews in their bedroom but make sure it’s tidy, make sure that the other people in the house are quiet, because the number of times I’ve seen people have to shout “Can you keep quiet? I’m on an interview!”

Lorna Bailey

You know, or they’ve got their dirty laundry all over the floor. Not ideal!

Thank you, so much. That’s been amazing. Really helpful.

It’s a theme that we’ll keep talking about here on BBC CWR.

Further Reading

Our guide to getting outplacement in your settlement agreement.

Read our top interview tips

Advice on how to write a standout CV