Originally Posted by
atpcliff
AA had 13,000 qualified resumes on file.
Now, in 2017, they had 3000 qualified resumes on file.
Originally Posted by
atpcliff
Cargo pilot (FedEx or UPS... He didn't say) said his own HR told him that they would run out of qualified applicants in about 2019.
That word "qualified" keeps popping up. The thing that people are glossing over is that there at the FedEx/UPS/American level, a lot of applicants are deemed
unqualified for a whole host of reasons which have nothing to do with their ability to fly an airplane safely and professionally. Anyone who has been paying attention to the UA airline employment scene for a while is aware that the "destination" airlines are completely swamped in applications, and their selection processes have evolved to include a lot of irrelevant criteria which exist solely to weed out applicants and reduce the numbers. An example is the requirement for a 4 year college degree. FedEx and UPS still require a degree. It's not a hard and fast requirement at American, but they generally do hire degree holders. A degree has nothing to do with whether one is "qualified" to fly an airplane, and I say that as someone who holds a 4 year degree, so it's not merely a case of sour grapes on my part. A few years ago I was observing a friend fill out an application for a major airline (American, I think) and one of the requirements was to submit a copy of their transcript from
High School!!! Are you effin' kidding me??!! Requiring an adult with a decade or two of industry experience to be judged on their grades when they were a child in public school??? (Public school has a different meaning in the US than the UK) Can you think of something less relevant that your childhood school report? Point being, was that a large portion of the pilot selection process at the US major airlines was an inane beauty contest (not all of it, but significant portion) designed not to make important, relevant distinctions, but just to quickly cut down the overwhelming numbers of applications to a manageable pool. So, when an HR person at an airline like FedEx says we have X number of "qualified" applicants, they mean applicants which meet our list of hiring criteria, not applicants who are "qualified" in a real world sense. I can guarantee you that FedEx and UPS could dramatically expand their pool of "qualified" applicants by removing their requirements for a college degree and making it known that applicants without degrees would be given equal consideration.
To be clear, this isn't intended as a rant against the degree requirement, specifically. It's just a useful example of the "requirements" in the Major airline hiring process which are not requirements in any real sense, but artificially skews the perception of what it means when an HR dweeb at FedEx says that they have XXX "qualified" applicants.