Lets not let the facts get in the way of some good old fashioned pilot bitching!
You have to understand that when you work for a subsidiary company the cards are stacked against you from the outset, compared to someone off the street when it comes to career progression. Primarily (especially if you're a captain in a subsidiary) it's the "double training" that gets you - the subsidiary has to train a replacement captain to fill your spot, and a replacement needs to be employed for the FO that got the upgrade. All those nasty training costs come off the bottom line of the group entity.
Actually its quite the opposite. Air NZ has pretty much been through the Link Captains and instructors, now they are moving onto the more junior guys. What is happening though is that they are upgrading FOs, giving them around 3 months in a command and then offering them an interview. They are going out of their way to try and make the process orderly and to give preference to Link pilots. Because of the shear numbers required outside candidates will be required, and of course there will always be the guys from the Air Force. To say that the cards are stacked against you as a pilot for a subsidiary is about as wrong as you can get.
CC, reading between the lines of your post, and assuming you did ok in the sim, then I'd suggest you said or did something that upset the Human Remains (HR) oxygen thieves.
These leaches have over the years got their toxic influence up to such a level that they often have the ultimate say so over if get employed or not.
It will mostly have nothing to do with you being able to do the job...more likely they have assessed that due to you not being able to weave a basket or perhaps convey a time when etc etc...you are in fact a closet axe murderer, or display latent pedophile tendencies, and are thus more suited to a role in HR, or revenue management
I know that people love to beat up on HR, and Im not always convinced by them, but people have to wake up to the realities of the process. HR do the initial weeding out of people in order to get guys to an interview. Things like have you got the prerequisite number of hours and licences etc, requirements laid down by pilots! The interview process basically revolves around two key aspects, the sim and the interview. Don't stuff up the other parts but realistically it comes down to the sim and the interview. The sim will see you in there with two pilots. The interview is the same, though there may be an HR type in there as well. A lot of guys I know that have been through recently didn't have the HR person there, and the ones that did didn't cop many questions from them.
Pilots are running the show, and the ones that I know that are interviewers etc are top blokes. Again I feel terrible for the guys that miss out, it must be gutting. The reality is though that to miss out at the moment means you did something pretty obviously wrong. Take the sim for example. CC talks about 10 years of good checks etc which is of course fantastic. Now I don't know how he/she did of course, but lets assume that it was the sim. 10 years of great sims followed by one bad sim, unfair? Perhaps, or perhaps there is an expectation that with that sort of background there shouldn't be a grossly bad sim like some of the ones Ive heard about. Interviewers get a short period of time with someone. They aren't expecting perfection in the sim, but they also don't expect you to crash or get lost.
All Im saying with all of this is to be prepared. The interview process isn''t a formality. The company is looking at hiring someone and having them on the books for the next 30 or more years. They need to make good decisions. So do prospective pilots. Do lots of prep, know your stuff backwards and you'll be fine. Walk in with a sense of entitlement and you probably wont find yourself flying for Air NZ jet.