Ghost Story

You wanna hear a radio story? I got one for you. This was a long, long time ago, back when I was still a Program Director, and I was up for a job at a big radio station, or at least a station that was big at the time. I was one of two finalists for the job, so they flew me into town, had me talk to the entire air staff, took me to lunch, put me up at a very nice resort hotel, told me I'd hear from them in a few weeks, and then...

Then I never heard from them again.

No, really, not a word. I saw they'd hired the other candidate in the trades. They didn't have the courtesy to call me. To this day -- it's been about 27 years or so -- I don't know why it went down that way. I just added it to the list of management quirks I've experienced and moved on.

The incident came to mind when I was reading an article at CNN about employers complaining that job candidates are ghosting them, cancelling or just not showing up for interviews. Some will get hired and not show up for the first day of work. The article has advice for the employers, like hiring and/or interviewing more people than you need so you have enough when people ghost you, speed up the process, things like that. What it doesn't talk about at all is the most important thing:

Treat employees with respect and pay them what they deserve.

That's fairly simple and obvious, but companies as a general rule don't follow that, because managers don't tend to see things from the employee perspective, even if they used to be among the riff-raff themselves. You get to the C-suite, you suddenly see things only as your investors want you to see them. You also develop powerful self-preservation instincts. Employees become objects, not people. And so, when employees or prospective hires gain power and turn the tables, it's a shock. It shouldn't be a surprise, and good companies can avoid that, but this "labor shortage" is exposing just how poorly some businesses and industries have been treating their workers for generations.

Okay, then, radio. Let's talk about our industry and how it treats its rank-and-file. Let's talk about the holiday season, and how we've been conditioned to expect one or more of the big radio operators to choose this time of year to fire large numbers of employees. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that some radio lifers have PTSD symptoms from expecting the ax to fall around Christmas-time, because it's happened time and again. We're more surprised that layoffs haven't been announced.

Yet.

Radio got away with things like holiday layoffs (gotta make those year-end numbers, gotta get the budget in line for next year), low starting pay (hey, you gotta start someplace), low job security, and other indignities because there was, for years, a high demand for jobs in the business. Radio was a glamour industry. You wanted in? You worked on the street team for little or no pay. You did whatever they wanted you to do, wherever you could get in the door, but you at least felt that with hard work and talent, you could work your way up the ladder. As you did that, you noted that the pay wasn't all that great, but, hey, you loved radio and you loved your job and there was nothing else in the entire world you'd rather do. And, if you worked for a mom-and-pop station rather than a big group owner, you were probably constantly reminded that you weren't just an employee, you were "family." (Note: You are most likely not their family.)

I don't have to tell you what's happened since. And I get it; for reasons both varied and well-known, radio as an industry has been going through tough times. But it's still a big business, still has a lot of listeners, still has a lot to offer, still might just have a future. As much as syndication, automation, and voice-tracking have been responsible for reducing staffing requirements, someone's still going to have to work in radio. Hey, even that AI-driven robot DJ voice that got some publicity this week (using the voice of my old Y-107 colleague Andy Chanley!) will need someone to feed it things to say before someone develops an algorithm to eliminate even that. Still, even if they manage to eliminate every single human-dependent job in radio at some point, that point is still far off, and we still need to attract good people to the business.

So, treat them well and pay them what they deserve. It's not hard. Job seekers won't ghost businesses that treat them the way they should be treated. A business that treats workers as interchangeable parts, on the other hand, deserves to be ghosted by applicants. An industry that's good to its rank-and-file will always draw better workers.

Oh, and that station that ghosted me? Sold, then sold again, lost all of its ratings in the process, retooled, and it's a shadow of its former dominant self. I take no pleasure in... oh, what am I saying? Of course I do, even though the people who did me wrong are long gone. They ghosted me, listeners and advertisers ghosted them.

I love a good ghost story with a happy ending.

=============================

One good thing about NOT getting that job is that I ended up being available for a better job in a bigger market, and that ultimately led to me joining All Access, which is one way to segue into a plug for one of the things I've been doing here for over 20 years now, All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page, a good resource for your show or podcast. Find it by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

Make sure you're subscribed to Today's Talk, the daily email newsletter with the top news stories in News, Talk, and Sports radio and podcasting. You can check off the appropriate boxes in your All Access account profile's Format Preferences and Email Preferences sections if you're not already getting it.

You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

=============================

There'll be one more of these columns (posting on December 10th) before All Access goes on its annual holiday hiatus and I go into full-speed-ahead moving-across-the-country mode. This should be interesting.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon