Mike Bailey Discusses How New Hiring Guidelines Stopped Him From Joining WWE

TNA star โ€œSpeedballโ€ Mike Bailey spoke with Chris Jericho as part of the Talk Is Jericho podcast on a number of topics including how signing with WWE several years ago was stopped due to the new hiring guidelines in place by the company at the time.

Bailey said, โ€œJanuary 2022 is when I debuted with TNA, with IMPACT then, but it was a long road even then. When my ban came up, the day I tweeted a little highlight video that I made, a little announcement my ban was ended, and then that got a lot of attention and that got me talking to everyone, that got me signed with NXT for a couple of months until they let me go without actually hiring me.โ€

โ€œAfter that video came out, I had already been talking with TNA, talked to some people from AEW, talked to NXT, got a bunch of offers and ended up taking the NXT one, very excited to be there, they do the background check, the do the visa paperwork, that takes a couple of months.โ€

โ€œJust a couple of days after I submit the visa paperwork, for this one you have to go and do a whole career retrospective and all the articles with all your accolades, you have to gather that and send it in, so I worked on that for several weeks, sent it all in and then I see theyโ€™re starting to release a lot of the people in NXT, theyโ€™re letting go of people, and the person that had hired me, there were rumors that they had gotten released, so I texted them and I was like hey, is everything okay, are we good, and they were like oh yeah, no problem, contractโ€™s in the mail, weโ€™re sending it tomorrow, and then the next day I got an e-mail saying hey, due to new hiring guidelines, weโ€™re going to have to stop your hiring process.โ€

โ€œI was not like whatever, I was freaking out, I was pretty panicked. Again, this is a big deal for someone like me, I had made some very serious steps to plan my move to Orlando, uproot my whole life and then, here we are again, so itโ€™s like well, letโ€™s see what we can do to fix this, and so I got back in touch with everyone that I had spoken to and I ended up signing with TNA, with IMPACT.โ€

You can check out the complete podcast below.