Yep I've heard the gossip as well but the plain fact of the matter is right now at this moment in time, no NZ regional let alone major airline has EVER taken a pilot straight out of flying school that I'm aware of, be it Eagle or Cook or Nelson or Airwork, be it CTC or Massey or Waikikamukau aero club or anyone who claims to have the connections.
Not disbelieving your sources for a second haughtney but I heard the exact same b******t a decade ago, in as many words, from the mouth of the so called super well connected management at Flightline. It was all just around the corner waiting to happen, Air NZ had done these audits and were so impressed with Flightline product in the wake of the Indo training contract and it was going to be 747 S/O jobs for all the boys and God knows what else. I know with retrospect that Massey and Ardmore were spilling the exact same crap with regard to their own schools to get students on board way back then as well.
Getting your freshly graduated students into right seats - especially Koru painted ones - has always been the holy grail of flying schools down home and a LOT of money has been fleeced off a lot of kids, on the basis of some always exclusive-to-this-particular-flying-school deal that was always just over the horizon and just about to be done.
General consensus amongst the captains up here in my outfit in the UK is that the CTC cadets are in fact pretty good - but this is here and NZ is there, and the hard fact is there's a widely accepted 50 year culture of 200 hour airline pilots up here, and a 50 year culture of the exact opposite down under.
Until I see actual evidence of meaningful numbers of students from any particular school, successfully getting into airlines ahead of high-hours GA pilots, then I still as an NZ wannabe wouldn't be touching CTC or Massey or any of these so called premium product schools. Right now all I see is punters paying a huge amount extra for the exact same licence and exact same extremely slim chance of not ending up on the dole queue when they've finished.