Qantas Recruitment

[Ollie Onion]

I went to a Qantas run seminar around 18 months ago and a very knowledgeable industrial psychologist gave a talk on the future of training in the Qantas Group with regard to Evidence Based Training. She was saying that there were pockets of the pilot group who did not perform to the required level during their career and it was being looked at how training could be improved to bring these individuals up to a better standard. She mentioned more 'role playing' etc. during CRM and Human Factor days etc. I asked a simple question 'why not change the way you recruit?', she was a bit confused by my question and was less than impressed when I said that surely pilots should run recruitment and we would possible get a better candidate by simply having a good old fashioned two on one sit down where the pilots can judge 'do I want to spend 9-15 hours with this person on the flight deck' during a fairly casual conversation. Follow that up with some basic tech questions and a quick sim where you demonstrate a visual circuit to them and then give them 4 attempts at getting one right! She said that all the HR research and training suggested that the intro of more role playing, tailored training etc was a better approach. I don't as such have a problem with the current state of play as I have always had a good rate of success with the behavioral type selection, so from a selfish point of you it works well. What is starting to concern me though is the new people getting employed do seem to have a great variation in flying ability which suggests to me that not enough emphasis is being put on the true 'aptitude' component in favour of the HR box ticking exercise that some of this has become.

I get the feeling that HR has 'self created' a massive mechanism to support their own need for Corporations. You could whittle down the applicants just as successfully using your min qualifications for application. For an airline like Qantas you could start with, must have a science based university degree and 3,000 hours, if that doesn't generate enough applicants then lower the requirements until you fill the pool.