Hi Joe
It’s refreshing to hear that someone in recruitment will look beyond total hours, which FTO a candidate studied at or who the candidate/ their family are friendly with. Excuse my naivety but it would almost sound like an outbreak of common sense, it’s a shame that it is not more widespread.
Looking in from the outside it appears that there are people involved in pilot recruitment who have never flown and slavishly obey stated minimums for all applicants with no application of common sense or judgement or senior pilots involved have forgotten that they were once low hours, inexperienced pilots looking for a break.
I came into the piloting world as a ‘career changer’ after having served as an Avionics Engineer in the military and saving sufficient funds to finance my own training without the scary loans that the younger candidates are forced to endure. As a consequence I don’t have ‘experience commensurate with age’ as I see mentioned a lot in recruitment ads and I am not on friendly terms with senior pilots.
So it does my morale good to note that recruitment is not a totally closed shop to older modular students who are not well connected.
You mention having called applicants who had CVs which interested you, as an insight what sort of content constitutes ‘interesting’ and sets one CV apart from a bunch of others?