Or...
1. There is no pilot shortage at all. Pure urban myth.
2. Regionals hire half of those who come through the door, even though they meet all the mins, and throw capable and qualified people back on the trash pile after every single interview at a rate of about 50%.
3. They will park perfectly good airplanes even to the point of defaulting on flying contracts because they are not happy with higher training costs via using above 50% of those coming through the door even after being pre-qualified by HR screeners.
All I know is the lady at RAH said "you do not have a pilot's license" at my interview and then sent me home, so what am I supposed to think? What would you think? Poor interview skills o my part? No, I had ok-enough interview skills. I have many a successful interview behind me at age 40+, much harder ones than these regional airlines. Rather, the training costs were too high for training me or so they thought and they would rather park the airplanes than let me waste their time.
Call me crazy, but I'm guessing your lack of an offer stems from the fact that the person doing the interview, whether incorrect or not, appears to have believed that you didn't hold a valid pilot's license...
Having done interviews at RAH in the past, I can cut through all this garbage and tell you a few things:
1) If they bring you in, we want to hire you. The job's yours to lose. There's no % of failures they shoot for.
2) At the completion of the interviews, all the interviewers that day convene in a room and talk about all the candidates. Candidates are culled for a few reasons, poor test scores on the knowledge or IQ tests, poor attitude during interview, poor performance during sim, some indication that they're just using this position to get current and then bolt, or some combination of the above. That's it. No one is turned down even though they're perfect, but we need to shoot down 50%.
3) I'm not sure what you're saying about the increased training costs, but the crux of what we're looking for, aside from someone without a bad attitude, is someone who can successfully pass training. The day they place your butt in class they've scheduled your sim sessions. If at any point thereafter you bust out or quit, they still have to pay for that time they reserved, to the tune of around $20,000. So, no, if there was something in your past or during your interview that indicated that you might require extra sim time, that would also indicate that you might fail out of training, even after said extra sim time, meaning RAH just wasted $20,000+ on sim time plus your paid wages and expenses. Their job as interviewers is to weed out those who are weaker pilots, or who may have issues during training.