Agree, although Polax may be describing the American recruiting market in the 1990s, in the UK at least it was lively. By '92 the airlines were so short of pilots that people were being offered airline jobs on the basis of a booked IR test! In fact the bottleneck became the good old CAA who were unable to test people fast enough and many pilots completed their IR course, booked a test some months later (you couldn't book until you had passed a 170A 'pre-test' flight), and then had do expensive refresher flying before the test. By the last half of the '90s Easyjet and others were desperate for pilots - a boon for many Ozmates with thousands of hours on small piston twins and no prospect of a jet job back home, who suddenly discovered v useful English grandparents. They are here still.