Originally Posted by
Sink r8
Let me take one last shot at this agonizing equine.
Not everyone in a class was hired together. I would order people by date of conditional offer. If there are multiple CJO's on the same day, then go by earliest application date. This way, you're rewarding the people that actually made it through the selection process first, and people with interest in the company second.
Your concern seems to be focused on who gets rewarded, and the things you're seeking to reward - date of successful interview and company interest - are rather odd to me. A seniority-based system laughs so hard in the face of fair rewards that I'm not interested in even trying to seek out a fair reward in this particular case. The reason I fully support age discrimination (how you like to characterize it) is this: it's more likely to put the more experienced pilots in the Captain seat for more days/months/years. Sure, there are wild deviations from the mean and the median, but there would at least be some measurable positive correlation between age and valuable life/flying experiences, where randomized SSNs by definition offer no such correlation.
If you PREFER randomness over purposeful age discrimination, the SSN method is a fantastic way to do it...let people know ahead of time where they are likely to fall such that they can use that information to make an informed decision about which airline to work for.
It's tough to care when Delta is churning out more than 100/month, but it will definitely matter down the road just as it already has in so many peoples' careers to date.