bmi - cabin crew question
Hi all
This is my first posting on here and my reasons for it are because reading through this thread, clearly there are a lot of people on here with well-formed opinions and factual information and because I am slightly at a loss, along with a number of other people, I was wondering if anyone had any insider information or circumstances they are aware of/previous experience as to why the following is as it is. Any help or insight would be much appreciated. I have tried approaching the airline directly but don’t seem to be able to get much out of them and also don’t want to make myself out to be a pain.
Since the beginning of the year, myself and a number of other people have responded to a job advertisement for cabin crew with bmi to work out of their new base at BHX. This is to crew the aircraft – an A319 currently operating 3 out of the 4 daily flights to FRA on behalf of Lufthansa.
The requirements were standard – no language skills for BHX although if you were going for MAN, (where the same thing has happened,) then being a German speaker was a compulsory part of your application.
After attending our respective assessment days in February and March, we were all informed by the Recruitment Department that we had been successful in our quest and we were to be waitlisted and placed into the holding pool. At our assessment events, (and I understand the position has been the same on subsequent assessment events, of which there have been 4 or 5) the Recruitment Team advised that they were recruiting for crew for LHR, BHX and MAN. During our interviews as part of this process, we all asked our respective interviewers when training would commence and they all seemed pretty certain that May was the key month.
Since then, I have spoken to bmi a number of times and met with various responses, none of which point to any requirements currently for crew at BHX. 6 new crew were put through a course in March and I believe them to now be flying. One of the reasons is that there “cannot be too many new crew at a new base.”There are courses in May and June but no BHX crew are scheduled on these. The latest information I now have is that there is possibly a course in September and this was on the same day that a new job advert was posted on totaljobs.com for Cabin Crew at BHX with German speaking only “desirable.” Therefore, the conclusion is that they are not looking for anything different than the people they have told have passed their assessment criteria.
So that’s the story so far. Ignorance of the aviation industry may be at play here and if so, I apologise in advance however we cannot understand the ongoing recruitment process for more crew when they are not then putting them through training. I understand you can be swimming around in a holding pool for a long time on certain occasions but the way it has been sold is that this is a new base for bmi and that they needed the staff. However, with only one aircraft – an A319 operating from this base, surely they are heavily over-recruiting for positions that will possibly never exist?
If anyone can offer some help, it would be appreciated. I don’t want to keep bugging bmi on the phone even though they are very nice and say call anytime for an update, I don’t want to be seen as a troublemaker. I was over the moon when I got offered the position and just want to get in the air, plus my existing job finishes in June. Maybe I am missing the point entirely?
Cheers in advance J