Why the Retail Manager Who Got Made Redundant Last Month Is Your Next Best Hire

And what retailers on both sides of that conversation need to understand right now.

Nearly 202,000 retail workers were made redundant in 2025. By March 2026, another 56,000 jobs were already at risk. The cull is not stopping, forecasts suggest 2026 will be worse still.

Behind every one of those numbers is a person. An experienced, capable, retail-literate person who has been told their role no longer exists, handed a letter, pointed at a portal, and left to work out what comes next on their own.

If you are an HR or People Director managing a restructure, this article is for you. Because the way you handle that moment matters more than most organisations realise.

And if you are the manager who just received that letter, this article is for you too.

I have spent 25 years in retail, including leadership roles at Homebase and House of Fraser. I have led stores. I have supported people through restructures. I have worked with managers on both sides of this: those commissioning the process and those going through it. And after all of that, I keep seeing the same mistakes made on both sides.

The Biggest Mistake: Treating Redundancy Like a Paperwork Exercise

Let me be direct about what I observe most often.

Redundancy in retail is almost always handled like an administrative process. It is regimental. Transactional. There is a script, a legal framework, a checklist, and the human part gets lost somewhere in the middle.

HR sends a letter. There is a meeting. The person is told their role is at risk. There is a consultation period. Then a notice period. Then a portal login, maybe a one-hour CV workshop, and a handshake if you're lucky.

And that is called outplacement.

It is not outplacement. It is box-ticking. And the damage it does is significant, not just to the individual but also to the organisation committing it.

Here is what actually happens to that manager in the weeks after redundancy. Confidence drops, often sharply, regardless of how strong their track record is. They start questioning themselves. They apply for roles below their level because uncertainty feels like humility. They get overlooked for roles they would be perfect for because their CVs read like descriptions rather than stories of genuine impact. Weeks pass, and the self-doubt compounds.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the market, a retailer is struggling to find a credible candidate for a regional leadership role.

The match exists. The confidence and infrastructure to make it happen do not.

What Good Actually Looks Like

I have also seen redundancy handled well. It is rarer, but when it happens, it changes everything.

The difference is not the budget. It is empathy. Not performative empathy, not a line in a script, but genuine human engagement. Someone sitting with the departing manager and saying: "Here is what we are offering; here is how we will support you; and you are not starting from zero".

The one thing that genuinely shifts someone's mindset from "I've failed" to "I've got options" is simple: space and examples. Space to process what has happened before being pushed into applications. And real examples, not platitudes, from people who have been through this and come out the other side stronger.

Because the managers I work with post-redundancy have almost always overcome difficult things before. Not redundancy necessarily, but setbacks. Periods where everything felt uncertain. The job is to remind them of that and then to help them see what they have actually built.

That is why generic outplacement does not work. A portal and a webinar cannot do this. It requires someone who understands retail, understands the emotional reality of what has just happened, and can help a person see their own value clearly enough to represent it to the market.

If you are managing a restructure and want to understand what retail-specific outplacement actually looks like in practice, you can read more about how we work here.

The Talent Hiding in Plain Sight

Here is something I have observed consistently over 25 years: the best retail talent is rarely found through a job board.

It is found in the aftermath of a restructure.

When a retailer restructures, it rarely loses just the underperformers. It loses people based on headcount targets, reporting lines, geography, and budget, not purely on capability.

Good people go. Experienced people go. People who, in different circumstances, would be exactly what another retailer would spend months trying to find.

The businesses that understand this move faster. They treat competitors' restructuring announcements as talent intelligence, not just industry news. They reach out directly and quickly before the best people find something else.

What those people bring with them is significant.

They have operated under real pressure. A retail manager who has led a team through a restructure, held people together when morale is fragile, and maintained commercial performance. At the same time, everything around them is uncertain, and they have developed leadership capabilities that cannot be taught in a classroom.

They have fresh eyes. Someone who has spent ten years at one retailer and is now entering a new business will spot assumptions your team has stopped questioning, and processes your team has stopped noticing.

They are motivated. A capable person who has processed their redundancy properly, taken time to reflect, and approached their search with clarity is often more engaged in a new role than someone who has been quietly coasting for two years.

They are available now, with no three-month notice period.

The Blind Spot Nobody Talks About: Pathways

There is a deeper issue underneath all of this that I do not think gets enough attention.

Retail used to have a dream, a simple one. You could start on a Saturday, putting trolleys back or working the till, and build a career that took you all the way to store manager, area manager, and regional director. That progression was real. I have seen it happen repeatedly. I have been part of making it happen.

We have lost that narrative. And with hundreds of thousands of experienced retail managers now on the market, that loss is showing up in a very specific way.

The biggest blind spot in retail talent is the lack of pathways.

Nobody is asking: how do we take a store manager with fifteen years of operational experience and help them transition into a head office role?

How do we value what they know about people, performance, culture, and decision-making under pressure?

How do we move them into retail operations, learning and development, people partnering, or commercial roles where their shop-floor understanding is not just useful but irreplaceable?

Instead, those managers compete against candidates who look better on paper. Against people with "cleaner" backgrounds. Against profiles that fit a template rather than a track record.

The result is a talent mismatch that costs retailers and individuals alike. And it is entirely avoidable.

For the Manager Reading This

You have probably put in the work. Maybe you started on the shop floor. Supervisor. Assistant manager. Store manager. You hit targets in difficult trading conditions. You built teams from scratch. You had performance conversations at 8 am before the store opened. You managed cash. You led through change probably more than once.

None of that disappears because your employer restructured.

What disappears, if you are not careful, is your belief in it.

The most common pattern I see in retail managers post-redundancy is not a lack of experience or capability. It is undervaluation. They know what they have done but they have lost confidence in how to talk about it. And so they undersell themselves, apply sideways or downward, and end up in roles that do not reflect what they are actually capable of.

Here is what I want you to hear: a retail manager who has spent fifteen years running a busy store has problem-solved more than most people do in an entire career. You have managed people, cash, pressure, and uncertainty often simultaneously, often with minimal support from above. You have built t culture. You have delivered results in an environment where every variable is moving.

That is not just retail experience. That is leadership.

The job right now is to start representing it that way. A CV that tells the story of what you delivered, not just what your responsibilities were. A LinkedIn profile that reflects who you actually are. A way of talking about your career that does not begin with an apology for the sector you work in.

Give yourself space to get there. Do not rush straight into applications before you have processed what happened. Find support that understands retail, not a generic career coach who has never set foot on a shop floor.

A Final Thought

The UK retail sector has lost close to 400,000 jobs in two years. That is not just a statistic. It is hundreds of thousands of people with operational knowledge, leadership experience, and an understanding of how retail actually wo,rks who are walking out of businesses that treated their exits as administrative tasks.

Some of them will not come back to retail. That is retail's loss.

But many of them want to stay. They love the sector. They are looking for an organisation that values people, that sees capability in a redundancy notice rather than just a cost line cleared.

Those people are on the market right now. The question is whether you can see them clearly enough to act.

Let's Talk

Whether you are an HR or People Director considering outplacement support for colleagues going through a restructure, or a retail leader navigating redundancy and wondering what your options are, I am happy to have a conversation.

Just a conversation with someone who has spent 25 years in retail, understands what this feels like from both sides, and can help you work out what comes next.

Email me directly: james@retailunboxed.co.uk

James Carpenter is the founder of Retail Leadership Unboxed, the only leadership development and outplacement business built exclusively for UK retail. With 25 years in retail, including senior leadership roles at Homebase and House of Fraser, he works with retailers such asHarvey Nichols, TK Max,x and Paul Smith, as well as individual retail leaders at every stage of their careers