Mostly, you don’t, not inside the CV itself. Redundancy reads completely differently from a dismissal to someone screening applications, and the CV is not usually where that difference needs to be spelled out. The date range and the next role after it already do most of the explaining; adding a justification in the CV body is more often what makes a screener notice something they’d otherwise pass over without a second thought.
That is the opposite of most people’s instinct. Redundancy feels like it needs defending, so the natural response is to explain it, and explaining it is usually what turns a non-issue into a visible one.
Why redundancy and dismissal are not the same signal
A screener reading a CV is mostly checking for one thing at the employment-history stage: does this person’s history suggest they’ll perform and stay. A dismissal for performance or conduct raises that question directly. A redundancy does not, because it says nothing about the individual; it says something about the employer’s headcount, budget, or restructuring, which is a decision made above and around the person, not about them.
Experienced screeners already know this distinction. The confusion mostly happens when a CV’s own wording blurs it, not when the fact of redundancy is stated plainly or left for the interview to cover.
What over-explaining actually looks like
The plain fact, said once, is not the problem. If the redundancy left a gap long enough to need a line of its own, “Role eliminated in company-wide restructuring” is the whole of that line, as the piece on employment gaps sets out. Over-explaining is what gets added on top of it: “role made redundant due to company restructuring, not performance-related” under a job title. That second half does the opposite of what it intends. It puts a defensive statement on the page before anyone has asked a question, which reads as anticipating suspicion rather than simply reporting a fact. A screener who wasn’t wondering about the reason now has a reason to wonder.
The same goes for lengthening a cover letter to devote a paragraph to the redundancy before the application has established anything else about the candidate. It moves the redundancy from a background fact to the first thing the reader learns, which gives it more weight than it deserves.
Where it actually belongs
The CV states the fact plainly through structure: employer, title, dates, achievements, next role. Nothing more is required. If the interview reaches the point of discussing why that role ended, and it usually does at some stage of a process, that is where a brief, factual explanation belongs: the role was made redundant as part of a restructuring, here’s what I did next. Said once, in person, it closes the question. Repeated in writing across the CV and the cover letter, it starts to read as something being managed rather than something simply true.
What a screener is actually checking for
What screeners look for around a redundancy, when they look at all, is not the redundancy itself but what happened immediately after: how quickly the person found the next role, and what they did with the gap if there was one. A short, well-used gap after a redundancy (further training, a documented project, active searching) reads as ordinary. The redundancy itself is rarely the part under scrutiny.
The short version
Redundancy and dismissal are different signals, and a CV’s structure already carries that difference without needing a written explanation. State the dates and the achievements, leave the reason for the interview if it comes up, and resist the instinct to defend a fact that doesn’t need defending. Over-explaining is what turns a non-issue into a visible one.
We don’t decide what to disclose or how to phrase it, and the tool doesn’t write explanations of why a role ended. What it does is reshape your real CV to match a specific posting, using only what you’ve actually done, so the page spends its space on the case for the next job rather than on the reason the last one ended.