Well, it would make sense to first take people out of the talent pool before taking CTC graduates. Then, if you require more people, you have a constant flow of CTC students which are on call and pretrained (by the way, they also have a holding pool themselves and are on call, just not for one airline).
Why invite NTSO for an assessment in the first place if youre not going to hire them?
This whole thing sounds like that Second Officers are mainly not required anymore and that screening them was a huge mistake.
Just be more open to the applicants..