Yes mad-jock has a point about the chief pilot. You are dealing with people. The people who make up an airline want to profit ! Their company needs to profit if it is to survive, and the individuals from the board of directors down to the apprentices all want to thrive on the profits of the business. It doesn't matter much if your business is selling furniture or operating an air transport company the same rules still apply.
With an airline business you need pilots. They cost money and quite a chunk. As well as salaries there are all the recurrent training costs, uniforms, medical costs, insurances, etc etc. An employer therefore wants one thing more than anything else. They want the best they can get for the best price. Like any other business the laws of general economics come into play. Such things as supply and demand, investment availabilty, points in the economic cycle all matter. Each company will have a relative position of strength and weakness within its own market sector and its own economic environment.
This all means that, for some companies they will seek and be able to attract experienced pilots from other companies. Others may wish to attract inexperienced pilots for entry level positions at low cost but perhaps higher financial risk. Others will seek a broader balance of the two. Others will rationalize and make do with the existing workforce. Others will make pilots redundant or cut back through natural attrition.
Those companies that are recruiting will either recruit by way of advertising or from their own resource ( commercial recuitment agencies / training employment schools / database ). from the availability they will select by their own criteria the relatively few people they wish to interview.
At the interview they will already know from your CV what your broad experience levels are and they will have a good idea of your background experience. If that didn't interest them sufficiently you wouldn't have got to the interview stage. The primary thing they now want to establish is personal interaction. They want to see in a very short time period how you articulate, what sort of personality they think you are, how able they feel you are to satisfy their requirements, how well you will fit in to the existing operation, if they like you as a person on first impressions, how well you may come recommended, will you be effective, and very importantly how mature are you.
Being human they won't always get it right. However this is a time honoured way of selecting employees and whatever tests you set, it is the interview that will ultimately decide candidate selection. They will probably have had a lot of experience in candidate selection and more often than not this method will work for them.
Bearing the above in mind, interviews will only be offered to a few based on differing selection criteria. Your job is to present yourself in the most attractive way you can. It is partly a game of skill and largely a game of luck. For the former keep improving yourself and for the latter the more you play the better your chances.
It doesn't matter to an airline how much you have invested in your career, or where you went to flying school. If they could get away with using machines to fly the planes they would. As an entry level pilot you don't have much to sell them except yourself as an individual. They want you to be as productive as possible, as inexpensive as possible and as little trouble as possible. In summary Tidy, keen, likeable and mature !