Bafan,
The reply wasn't directed at you. Yes, companies today do have a hard time filling slots. It may be a company that's offering a position with specific requirements. Ample applicants respond, but few are often qualified. Or it may be a position in a remote, less desirable area. Or a lower paying position. Some will become self-indignant and stammer that the operator should be paying more...but not every mom and pop operation out there can afford a quarter of a million a year. Some don't pay so well, and that's a fact of life.
I've sent applications to companies before only to have them respond, "you're over qualified." Now I didn't know anybody could be overqualified for anything. I think the term is an oxymoron. Either you're qualified, or you're not. But their intent was clear; they were asking if the job might be a step backward. I didn't think so, but apparently the majority of their applicants did, and consequently, they had a hard time filling the slot.
I recently viewed an advertisement on a web site for a part time pilot. I read the ad, and felt that the pay was extremely low. I contacted the individual who placed the ad, a doctor who was looking for a personal pilot to fly him once a month to a vacation spot. We corresponded for a short interval. A nice enough guy, and quite sincere, he wanted to pay fifteen thousand a year for a pilot to fly a piston commander half way across the country, once a month. He wanted pilots with a minimum of five thousand hours experience, and a reasonable amount of commander experience.
According to him, he has no shortage of applicants. While there may be experienced pilots who think this is a treat, I think it's an insult, and I told him as much. He felt that on a day for day breakdown, it was reasonable, but that's up to interpretation, I suppose. In his case, he claims he has no trouble finding pilots. In many other cases, I would suspect that the job wouldn't be easy to fill.
Even with the glut of instructors clammering for their first job, restrictions by aircraft type, work type, etc, still mean that the inexperienced may not be qualified, and the more experienced may not want the job. How many here who have any significant experience could afford to go take a job at a regional airline?
I worked for a company flying Lears. We had six pilots in a row who didn't perform. Several didn't fly a single trip. One didn't even come home. He took his type training, and got a different job right out the door of Flight Safety in Tuscon. Our company didn't pay the top dollar in the industry, and we had a hard time filling slots with people who had the honor to stick around after they accepted the training and the type rating. (All six came from one of two backgrounds that, in my experience, is prone to that kind of action).
Another company flying a Sabreliner required at least one of the pilots to hold an A&P certificate. This isn't uncommon. A lot of pilots hold Sabre types. Most who hold sabre types don't have a mechanic certificate. Of those, not a lot would necessarily want to move to a small mountain town. And so on...consequently, even though the job is there, it may not be readily fillable.
Another problem I see is that applicants sound good, but you never know until you get them in the saddle, how they'll do. We had a pilot this last year who badly wanted to fly for us. We noted his experience, asked him to go get some more and check back in a year. He located an operator and checked with us to see if the experience would be a good start. We said yes, he started work, and after three landings crashed the airplane. We couldn't use him now if we wanted to...the insurance says no...but far better the insurance says no than our airplane got wrecked, too...he had all the paper qualifications, but lacked the basic skills.
In the last year I've had two F/O's whose competence I seriously questioned. I went to far as to write the chief pilot letters about both,and then place phone calls asking if perhaps their background wasn't the same as what they preached. To my knowledge, they're both still full time pilots, but I can't imagine how they made it as far as they did. I was dumbfounded. One told me that my job was to make him a captain, and my response was that he needed to learn to be a first officer, first. After a little exposure, my response was that he needed to learn how to fly, first.
I've had a lot of F/O's that are great...I've sent letters of recommendation on their behalf. But just this last year, two that stunned me with their lack of competence. There's no other way to say it. These are folks who either "built time" or merely penned in what they had. One claimed to have had over six thousand hours, but I don't think I've ever met a two hundred hour private pilot who wasn't superior to that individual.
One can always fill positions, but one never knows for certain what one has until that person goes to work. I've met that level of incompetence at all levels. An air ambulance operation for whom I worked employed a chief pilot who was a raging idiot. He and I butted heads like you wouldn't believe. I finally left, and a few months later they fired him. It took two incidents, which had been going on all along, for them to finally do it...but they fired him. The first one...he was flying a VOR approach at night into a very rural mountain airfield on a moonless night, and had his altimeter set 500' too low. He forgot the gear, and a medic happened to catch him on both, inside the FAF. The second incident, a week later, involved him taxiing off the taxiway at the same field in the daylight, through the rocks, with an emergency patient on board, and stopping inches from catching a prop on a rock in the BE 20.
High time pilots, low time pilots, not worth their weight in salt. Lots of good pilots out there, too...but advertising for pilots is a little like fishing with a net. You take what you can find, and pick and choose with your best judgement, or the best judgement of those employed to do it for you. In the case of the raging incompetent chief pilot, the company was managed from a distance, and the distant people just couldn't see how bad the chief pilot was. They were also using someone else's certificate, and the chief pilot was employed by that someone else. The Chief Pilot hired new pilots, which threw the whole hiring process into question. You can see how it might snowball from there.
Yank thinks it's just me...but we see it at all levels, in all forms, in all departments. The Sabretech folks, et al, who loaded unsecured oxygen cannisters on Valuejet. The Alaska folks who pencil whipped work cards and mislubed the jackscrew on an Alaska MD80. The recent BE1900 loss involving an improperly rigged elevator, ad infinitum. People doing the work with paper qualifications but not necessarily worth what's written on the paper, and as a result, people died. It's not arrogance on my part, it's a fact of life.
Yes, with all the paper-qualified applicants out there, sometimes jobs aren't easy to fill. From time to time, I've been responsible for filling them, and I'm quite convinced about whence I speak, based not on jaded mistrust, but on observation. You'd think the jobs would be easy to fill...but it's not always the case. In my experience, far better to wait for the right applicant than hire in haste and pay the consequences.
