US and Europe greatly differ with the hiring process and the qualifications.
In scheduled airline world, in US, you need at least an ATP and relevant hours as a minimum to be considered to fly something like A320.
In Europe, with most of the carriers, pilots enter A320 right after the flight school.
Do they have the experience like the 1500hrs guy has?
No, they don't, but usually they do have quite a bit more aviation studies behind them. Does that substitise for the lack of actual air time? In my opinion it completely does not. But this is the way it works here. The history / reason for hiring 200hrs guys right out of aviation college is simple. Europe did not nor we still have such a large general / corporate / flight school aviation than the US has. There were no 2000hrs guys with proper age and backround available.
In business aviation in Europe it is almost the same. Specially with the rapid growth we had during the past 10 years, a lot of new pilots entered, and many of them with very little experience.
I am currently flying GEXs with a F/O who has about 1000 hrs TT.
But he joined our company around 3 years ago with 200 hrs and has already flown little bit (800 hrs) of Falcon and Challenger.
And he is exteamly sharp and motivated and understands that he is actually quite lucky to be sitting on that seat.
Summasummarum, generally speaking I would personally prefer guys with little bit of experience, but it also seems to work this way.
