You're Hired...Or Not

By Frank Absher

There is no rhyme or reason as to who gets hired and who doesn’t, at least not on the surface. But some digging will often yield a lot of dirt.

At one station I worked with a delightful lady. She had no qualifications for her job, but her ex-husband was a major advertiser and he approached the manager asking for a job for the woman he was divorcing. She got the job without even coming in for an interview.

Qualifications? Forget about them. I had an excellent interview and the news director made no effort to conceal the fact that he was impressed. The moment to wrap things up came and he said, “I’d hire you today if your skin were a different color.”

Which leads me to some feedback I got on a piece I recently wrote. In the article I noted that, during a hiring process, I chose to only consider those applicants with college degrees, which cut the number under consideration to about 35.

A half dozen people from around the country took umbrage with this, telling me there were many good people who don’t “have that piece of paper.” This is, of course, correct. But as I’ve learned in life, the hiring process will always displease more people than it pleases.

These respondents all admitted that they had not gone on to get a degree beyond high school. I wish them well, but would make the same hiring decision again, some 30+ years later.

Most of the managers I’ve known would probably stick by their hiring decisions, no matter how questionable they were.

One owner for whom I worked suddenly told me he’d hired an assistant for me. Seems her husband was an attorney and one of the attorney’s clients was threatening to sue my boss.

A small market owner had a part-timer who would come in with his own stack of records and break format each weekend. The part-timer was an ad buyer for a local beer distributor.

A small market owner whose husband had recently passed away was in dire need of an announcer. She hired her hairdresser’s “companion,” who had never been in radio before, but she said she’d always been able to trust her hairdresser.

The job hunt can take a tremendous emotional toll on you, but in the end the most intelligent approach is to avoid beating yourself up over jobs that got away.

I remember a rejection letter from a station in Grand Junction, Colorado. They told me I was no longer under consideration “due to the high standards we have for our staff.” Within a couple years I’d been hired at KMOX, the St. Louis CBS O&O powerhouse.

I still marvel from time to time at how great that Colorado station must have been. I wasn’t good enough for them, but for some reason, I was good enough for KMOX.

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