Recruitment Preferences
I think it's pretty fair to say this about airline recruitment. When it's a buyers' market they would much rather take integrated students. When there's a pilot shortage they'll take anything with a pulse and a licence!
Even the really big players, who claim only to take from integrated schools, in fact take from the modular pool when pilots are thin on the ground. And don't forget that for quite a while CTC only offered a form of integrated moduar.
Perhaps it might help if I offered some perspective from the other side of the interview desk.
Recruiters are quite often hamstrung by their own inexperience or are bamboozled by their HR departments who think they know a lot about recruitment but simply have a different set of biases.
That aside, ultimately what you're trying to find out in the space of a relatively short interview are two things: is this guy capable of doing the job well and is he going to be easy to get along with during a long duty period.
It's much easier to quickly gauge a graduate from an integrated school. If you know the school you're broadly aware of their output standard. So you can answer the first question with some confidence and all you then have to do is figure out if the guy is OK personality wise.
Modular student are less easy to fathom. They usually have bags of motivation but their flying instruction may have been patchy.
When faced with one of these the first thing I looked at was their log book. Time to first solo gave me some sense of their innate flying ability. Pattern of hours building gave me some idea of their value. 7 hrs a day in a 172 in Florida was a dead giveaway. To all intents and purposes their experience (even if they had genuinely done the hours) was useless in terms of preparing them for a type rating.
Next I used to look at their education and employment. A pattern of achievement and diligence was always a good sign. Gaps in the CV, sporadic job changes and very average exam results was usually interpreted as a sign of drift or lack of self discipline.
Finally, it was absolutely amazing to me how many newly qualifed pilots knew absolutetly jack s**t about basic technical knowledge. One guy couldn't tell me what the basic function of fuel was. Many stuggled to give me even the most basic description of how a jet engine functioned.
But, despite all this, I took quite a few ex modular students because they were clearly able and motivated.
My advice at the moment would be to go for integrated if you can afford it. If not, look for a modular route that demonstrably offers more than simple passing of exams and tests.
Ground school is a classic. Anyone who signs onto ATPOnline can pretty much guarantee 95%+ pass marks in their exams, so this is no longer an indication of quality or ability. On the other hand some ground schools now offer tracked training in which your performance and attitude are monitored and a report given to your FTO.
The FTO itself insists on structured hours building and at the end produces a combined ground/flight report for the airline.
This undoubtedly gets over many of the problems of the modular route and sets you slightly above your modular peers. Anything which does that can only be a good thing.
I hope you find this useful. If you'd like further advice feel free to PM me.