SWA interviews

[Snoopy58]

Falconjet,

I agree that "fairness" per se doesn't drive everything in a hiring process. Southwest DOES pride itself on treating people well, including applicants as well as employees, so that will limit the "arbitrary & capricious" application of policies, but the rules are still the rules.

However, my point is that in choosing the best qualified applicants, I'm not sure that the guy with 10,000 hours and 10 years at "Brand X" is more qualified to be a newhire at Southwest than the guy with 3000 hours in military jets. More experience in -121 ops, when it potentially comes with a long history of "at Brand X, we did things like...," doesn't necessarily make for "best candidate." Besides, it would seriously skew the demographics of the pilot force to only hire 45 year old furloughees for the next couple of years!

I'm not suggesting that furloughees, or any other group, will be excluded from the new hiring process; only that mid-career military guys who would've been competitive before will probably continue to be competitive, and that the presence of lots of 10,000 hour -121 furloughees in the applicant pool shouldn't cause military pilots with 3000 hours to lose hope of being hired.

 

[Falconjet]

We are in serious agreement!

Snoop: I hear you and I vehemently agree with you. I was directing my comments to Boz because he seems worried that he will lose his space in line to a better qualified candidate.

Southwest is as fair a company as there is out there and they seem to treat their employees (and perspective employees) as well as any airline, but EVERYBODY is going to say that they always wanted to fly for them, so they have to go by the quals that they deem important, not just who applied first.

Applying first is great, but with the number of qualified pilots out there I don't think they will stick with a first in-first to be interviewed mentality.

We are all just speculating, of course, only the PD folks know how they will fill their interview slots. Most airlines like to have a variety of experience groups in their new hire classes and I'm sure that a reasonable percentage of them will be ex-military pilots.

In the meantime SWannabes should be focusing on getting the type and getting as much quality time that they can, not worrying about whether the process will be fair when it opens up again. The good folks at SW will implement a system that meets their needs and will no doubt be as fair and reasonable as can be.

I wish Boz the best of luck and hope he gets to feel the Luv soon!

 

[SWAnnabee]

Appreciate the responses

Thank for the replies. I WILL keep the press on to join the ranks of LUV. I have made my decision on where I want to be. The wife is behind this all the way too. Hope everyone out there gets to where they want to go.