EZY future recruitment

[Alexander de Meerkat]

As one who has often championed easyJet's cause, and been much criticised for doing so, I have to say that I cannot condone what has happened here. Contrary to the statements of the conspiracy theorists, I do not believe there is some secret scheme in place to ruin peoples' lives or to raise their hopes only to disappoint them at the worst possible moment. Nonetheless, I do believe that what has happened here is very poor form indeed. This latest email was at least personal, which is more than the previous ones were. This round of recruitment is, in all honesty, an embarrassment due to the succession of errors made by people who should have known better. The reality is that job offers were made, which should never have happened, and consequently the 'pilot recruitment team' had to rescind them when they discovered they had not got the authority to make them. It is not rocket science. An e-mail as follows should have gone out along the following lines -

'Congratulations Mr Bloggs, you have passed the selection but due to an excess of suitable candidates for a limited number of vacancies we cannot offer you a pilot job immediately. Your name will be held in a holding pool for 6 months and should a suitable vacancy arise in that time you will be offered it. If after that time we are still unable to offer you a position, your name will be removed for our files and you will have to re-apply for any future pilot vacancies using the full recruitment process in place at that stage. Please accept our sincere apologies for the uncertainty this generates, but we cannot be more specific until our final recruitment targets for the coming year have been finalised. In the meantime, we strongly advise you not to turn down any other career opportunities in the hope that easyJet will offer you employment in the future, as we cannot make any firm offers or guarantees at this time. Thanks etc.....'

That took two minutes to think up and would have saved enormous hurt and pain to many people. What we have done is simply disgraceful and is inexcusable. As a slight aside I am not quite sure why we care if people are type-rated or not. We are making the applicants pay the entire cost of the rating and are sending business the way of our pilot training organisation, while not getting involved with the money aspects of things. The problem with our type-rated policy is that it discludes a vast number of high quality candidates who have frankly more to offer than some of the type-rated people we take. There have been some guys from high quality companies too, but I see no real gain for us one way or the other. I have to profess to being very disappointed with what has unfolded here, particularly as I know personally some of those who have been let down. In truth, once you are through the door of easyJet, you tend to deal with some very high quality people, but that is no consolation for those who have been affected by this situation.