The AirNZ jet seniority list IS date of joining!? The difference since the middle of 2018 is that if you’re an external hire - for every 3 of you the company hires they have to attach the same joining date to 7 regional pilots notionally on LWOP awaiting release from the links. This was to address the unfairness of being overlooked because they couldn’t be spared off of the link fleet. The trouble arises when you have a big group hired on the same start date, you arrange the list according to Pilot total time for that start date. So some guys have been with the jet fleet for nearly 2 years and still have 30 or 40 link pilots ahead of them on the seniority list who have never started. People who were involved in the pathways development warned the designers that the system was a pit of vipers in the case of mass redundancy on multiple occasions but they were ignored.