First off, i was writing about 200 hour (nowadays 80 hour) wonders out of in-house flight schools or company supervised flight schools. Usually the money spend on training those even if they pay part of it themselves is quite high, as is the effort in selecting them in the first place. It is not a way to get cheap pilots, it is a way to get the highest quality and best trained pilot and costs a lot more than just getting some out of work guy from an unaffiliated school or even some experience guy, even though a company has to retrain the latter one at cost between both prior possibilities. And those companies usually have a longer than normal and very hands on supervision phase on short haul operation which means a lot of landings and manual flight each day. Unlike those long haul guys that do around one or two landings a month (3 long haul rotations a month with 3 or 4 pilots per rotation).
Besides, you mean the likes of THY in amsterdam? The FO had gained around 4000 hours on fast jets in the turkish air force, still didn't help his handling qualities.
Anyway, you can't really generalize, as cadetship pilots are a different thing than your run of the mill flight school graduates. Even companies running their own cadet scheme will have to take on occasionally external direct entry pilots and you usually see a big difference in training right away.
@bubbers, i haven't been in a screening where any automatics was allowed. And yes, my initial screening was done in an MD80 simulator for a 737 company. No chance to train for it as they changed the type of screening aircraft each time, using especially older generation jets. And of course completely manual flight including an engine failure even for us 200 hour wonders.