Once upon a time.
Airlines would recruit their First officers based on a required level of minimum experience. That wouldn't be their only requirement, but it was usually the initial filter employed to start sorting out the application pile. Broadly speaking an airline recruiting on to jet equipment would require the requisite licence and instrument ratings together with a minimum of 1500-2500 hours to include at least 500 hours on jet or turpo prop equipment in excess of 15 Tonnes MTOW. The levels of remuneration offered were set to reflect the market rates required to entice this level of experience. The typical source of this recruitment was: The military; Improvers from airlines or operators further down the food chain; and those looking for a company change for their own career progresion.
There were a few airlines dabbling in their own versions of "Hamble" by offering a very limited degree of trainee or apprentice level inputs from approved and recognised training schools. The requirements for these schemes and the intense competition tended to set their own quality bars. The limited numbers also enabled these schemes to, by and large, integrate reasonably comfortably alongside the traditional input.
The change started to become radical when new entrant "lo-co" carriers wanted to reduce any and every input cost that the rules would allow. If they could have eliminated the right seat, they would have done it in a heartbeat. They couldn't, so they looked at methods of reducing the cost of filling it. By looking at these "cadet" schemes, they could see that all anybody really needed to do if they were prepared to accept no experience at all, was to get anybody with a requisite licence and rating to occupy this seat. In the UK (JAR) changes to the licensing system meant that you could (if you stripped out any requirement for experience,) recruit from an almost bottomless pool of 200 hour excited and anxious hopefulls. Not only that but these same hopefulls would be only too happy to pay for the training costs and assume all the risk themselves, when previously that had fallen to the employing company. Happy days!
The regulator shrugged their shoulders, since "experience" had been something the airlines had demanded, it wasn't a regulatory requirement for this type of flying. If the terms of reference for the job (experience) were stripped back to the bone, then why would anyone expect the remuneration rewards to reflect the previous terms and conditions? That was the whole point of the exercise. As other airlines saw their competition getting away with lower input costs, so they themselves had to adapt to survive. Those that haven't adopted these practices tend to be companies that operate in more regulated or restricted marketplaces (long haul, Heathrow,) where this type of competition isn't yet nipping at their heels.
So as long as the regulator doesn't care, and as long as there are no unfortunate public relations disasters, and since the seat must for now be filled, why not either reduce costs or better still, turn it into a profit centre?
Kidding yourself that applicants for these roles should be rewarded by terms and conditions commensurate with those that relected the higher experience base of yesteryear, is wholly unrealistic, and a complete denial of what is actually happening. Eventually, reality will swamp the dreams of the wishfull thinkers as the market T&C's become the established norm for this role. It is also quite possible that regulation forced on by public opinion or perception, will bring about regulatory changes that do in turn result in improved experience levels. (It is happening in the USA now.)
It is also broadly true that those who have stayed a few steps in front of this incoming tide are breathing a sigh of relief. However as events of recent years have proven that tide is coming in very fast, and is now starting to swirl dangerously around the ankles of those who previously felt unthreatened.
So all those many 200 hour wanabees bemoaning the lack of airline vacancies or the declining terms and conditions, should open their eyes and realise that historically their experience base would not (in all but but a tiny minority of cases) have got them anywhere near a jet airliners flight deck. The fact that it might do now, is either because they are from a school afflilated to an airlines low entrant cadet scheme, or because they are prepared to pay to occupy a role where the same level of experience is no longer demanded.
You can pay a company to let you drive around Brands Hatch in a Ferrari, but that won't turn you into Michael Schumacher, and it most certainly won't reward you like him.