I had to cancel my previous message 'coz for the first time ever (...or the third...) I was sooo furious I lost control and wrote heaps of things that I regretted afterwards...
Just a few points:
- SWISS is about to fire 300 to 400 people of which a third are pilots... therefore another third will be cabin crew
- interviews are going on anyway
- we were told that the market fluctuates enormously therefore, when the company will start hiring again, probabily around may next year, we will be considered for the position... (try to say that to the people you fire!!!...)
- SWISS rebirth happened because of Swiss tax payers and the government wanting to rescue their national airline, however 90 percent of candidates were French... Swiss stated many times in the last few months that the company would have privileged Swiss citizen... bah!
During the interview, we had to complete a general knowledge test, which had questions like "which of these mountains is in Switzerland?" (I didn't recognize any of them... all the names were spelled in Swiss-German, which is a dialect), put together countries and airlines (where QANTAS was spelled Quantas...) and mention in which city is the Eiffel Tower located... eeeeehhhhh???!!?? What is this??? A joke??
The rest of the test was related to languages. A huuuuuuuge test in German, 30 questions of grammar and 20 of comprehension and synonyms... while on my application I clearly mentioned I was NOT fluent in German. Then we had to write half to one page about a current event in English...
I am a bit surprised (and disappointed) that none of the excersises we did were involving a group discussion or our previous customer service. Everything was focused on language knowledge...
I then had a 20 minutes interview with a recruiter (very nice lady). She asked a couple of irrelevant questions in french, then english, italian and finally german... since the questions were leading us nowhere, I asked her if the aim was to test my languages... and she nodded.
I went straight to the point: since my German is no good, what are my chances?? Aaaahhh... The answer was something like "you should start right now an intensive course of German conversation and come back in May for a test. At that stage we can offer you the position and you would be based in Zurich, where you can fly better types of aircraft and have a quicker and better carrier (on long-haul after a year)"...
The old story... learn German or get lost! I bet people from the Swiss-french and Swiss-italian part will understand what I am talking about, here... the old conflict that never dies! Talk about a rebirth!! My neck! It is not enough to be fluent in French, Italian and English... even if was to speak Cantonese, Russian, Arabic and Japanese as well I wouldn't be hired! And then you fly long haul to Asia on their MD11 to find out that "Brot" and "bread" is pronounced the same way... by shaking the bun under your nose...
Bah! What was I doing there? I don't remember...
Mrs. FloatJockey