Hiring is the hardest part of running a small-market station, and it is the part most owners are least trained for. You spend years becoming competent at broadcasting, and then one day you find yourself trying to decide whether the person sitting across from you in a job interview is going to be a good master control operator. The pool of experienced candidates is thin, the wage pressure is real, and the wrong hire can set you back a year. Let’s talk honestly about how to do this better.
The first truth: you are not hiring from the same pool as a top-fifty market
LPTV hiring happens in a different world than major-market broadcasting. In most of our markets, there are not dozens of trained broadcasters waiting for an opening. There are a few, and the local college or trade school may or may not be producing replacements. This reality has to shape how you approach hiring, because trying to run a major-market playbook in a small market is a recipe for frustration.
What that means practically is that you are almost always going to be making a tradeoff between experience and potential. Experienced broadcasters with the exact skills you need are rare in small markets and usually expensive. What is available is people with adjacent skills, people new to the industry with strong underlying ability, and people currently in the industry who are ready for more responsibility than they currently have. Your job is to learn to identify the second and third groups and build a station that develops them.
The traits that actually predict success
In my experience, three things predict whether a new hire will work out in a small station, regardless of their previous experience.
Learning speed is the first one. Broadcasting is technical enough that no matter who you hire, they are going to need to pick up a lot of things quickly. I would rather hire someone with less relevant experience who can learn fast than someone with the exact background who is set in their ways. You can gauge this in an interview by asking about something they had to teach themselves in the last two years and listening for specificity in the answer.
Ownership mindset is the second. I have talked about this before. You want people who care about the outcome, not just the task. The tell is in how they describe previous jobs. Do they talk about what they did, or what the team accomplished, or what the business achieved? The answers often reveal how they will approach your job if you hire them.
Tolerance for small-station reality is the third, and it is the one most people skip. Small stations require everyone to wear multiple hats, work with imperfect equipment, and deal with the occasional chaos that comes with thin staffing. Some people thrive in that environment. Others are miserable. You need to be honest in the interview about what the job really looks like, because the person who takes the job thinking it will be like a big-market station and discovers otherwise is going to quit in four months, leaving you back where you started.
Where to actually find candidates
Job boards are mostly a waste of time for LPTV. The best candidates I have seen hired in our industry come through three channels.
Your own network is the first. Other station owners in nearby markets. Engineers you have met at industry events. Former employees who have moved on and might know someone looking. A well-placed phone call will outperform a job posting nine times out of ten.
Local colleges and trade schools are the second. This is relationship work. Go meet the department chair. Offer to be on their advisory board. Host an internship program. You will not see results in the first year. You will see results in year three and every year after that. The stations I know that have invested in this consistently have strong entry-level pipelines and are paying them back with ongoing referrals.
Adjacent industries are the third, and this is where small stations often overlook talent. People who have worked in live event production, corporate video, radio, and local print have transferable skills. They will need to learn broadcasting specifics, but many of them have exactly the temperament and adaptability a small station needs.
The interview questions that actually work
Most station interviews I have seen are not very rigorous. They are conversations. The person comes in, they seem nice, they have some relevant background, and they get hired. That approach has a hit rate that is worse than it should be.
Ask candidates to describe a specific situation where something went wrong at their last job and what they did about it. Listen for ownership, problem-solving, and honesty about their own role. People who describe every past failure as someone else’s fault will do the same at your station.
Ask them what they would want to accomplish in their first ninety days if you hired them. The strong candidates will have thought about this and have something concrete to say. The weak ones will give you platitudes.
Ask them what questions they have about the business, not just the job. Candidates who are curious about how the station operates, how it makes money, and what the challenges are tend to be the ones who will grow into more responsibility. Candidates who have no business questions are usually just looking for a paycheck, and that is fine for some roles but not for bench candidates.
Compensation and retention
Let me be honest. Small stations will rarely win a pure compensation battle against bigger operators. You have to compete on other dimensions, and the good news is that many candidates actually value those dimensions. Real responsibility earlier in their career. A shorter commute. A culture where they are known as a person, not a number. The chance to build something rather than maintain it. A path to ownership or equity participation, where feasible.
What you cannot do is underpay significantly and expect loyalty. If you are paying well below market, your best people will eventually leave. The goal is to be competitive on base pay, then layer on the non-financial factors that make your station a place people want to be.
And retention starts before the first day. How the offer is made, how onboarding is handled, and how the first month is structured set the tone for the entire tenure. A new hire who feels lost, unsupported, and unsure of expectations in week one is already on their way out the door, even if they don’t know it yet.
Hiring is not a task. It is one of the most important leadership functions you perform. Treat it accordingly.
