Hayley Pearson: When the end of a radio gig is just the beginning

Once upon a time, a radio colleague who’d lost his job asked me “Do people in upper management get training on the right way to sack someone?”

In any company – whether a person is being let go, fired or their position is being made redundant – there’s no easy way to break it to an employee that their services are no longer required.

As someone who was made redundant not once but twice during my own radio career, I know only too well how it feels to be blindsided.

You’d hope it could all be handled with grace and dignity, but too often, it’s cold and clumsy.

If these people were doctors, they’d be told their bedside manner sucks.

Hayley Pearson loves radio. But for a long time, she didn’t.

This week Hayley – co-host of Hayley & Max in the Morning on Adelaide’s Mix 102.3 – cried as she recalled on-air how losing a previous radio job left her with PTSD.

“I’m very well aware that in radio, you get fired. But you haven’t lived in radio, until you’ve been fired,” Hayley said.

“I have learnt there is a way that you do get rid of people, and you do it with kindness.”

“Mine wasn’t done with kindness. It hurt. A lot.”

“I won’t say where it was but – I literally have blocked out, I reckon, four years of my life, because it made me hate radio,” Hayley told co-host Max Burford.

Hayley, who was pregnant at the time, said the station was in the process of changing its whole look and feel.

“I just wanted answers. I just wanted to know if I was coming back after I had my baby. I just wanted to know so I could plan.”

But Hayley says her questions seemed to fall on deaf ears and, in the lead up to her departure, people started avoiding eye contact with her.

“I started having full panic attacks where I couldn’t breathe.”

In radio, we often feel we can’t take a day off when we’re sick, but, so stressed was Hayley, she decided to take a Mental Health Day.

Not long after, she got a call asking her to come into the station for a chat, where she was told she was being let go.

“My contract was ending, so that’s OK,” she said. “Obviously sad, but also fine.”

“I then walked out of the office, past my boss’s office, and he didn’t look up. He just sat in front of his desk as I walked past.”

Adding to her distress, Hayley says what she ended up telling her listeners was not a true reflection of the reason she was leaving.

She’s a firm believer that losing your job can be the circuit breaker that gets you out of your rut and opens up a world of possibilities you might otherwise never have considered.

Starting Adelady – a media platform which showcases South Australia – was Hayley’s saving grace.

“There are a lot of redundancies going on at the moment,” she said. “It’s hard. Life is hard.”

“Quite often, people are complacent in jobs and they’ll wait until something like that happens.”

“But sometimes, when you’re made redundant and you lose your job, it’s the best thing that will ever happen to you, because you will reset your brain and you will end up doing something that you want to do.”