Not necessarily. The standing bid department goes down the seniority list looking for FOs who have bid a CRJ CA position in a base with vacancies and who are qualified to be Captain. They keep going down the list looking for people who fit those criteria until they fill the class, then they stop. Apparently either more senior FOs who did have it bid are not qualified or not enough senior FOs have bid a CA position, or if they have, it's in a base which their seniority cannot hold. Obviously in order to fill this class they had to go down to Sept 2015 hires.

Once the more senior FOs become qualified and/or decide they want to bid it, then when the next vacancy award gets run, they will slot right in above the guys who were awarded it first but are junior to them.

The great majority of our new hires have no Part 121 time and it takes 18 months to 2 years to get that time, so right now only those hired in the summer of 2014 and earlier have the time under their belts. Once you start getting to fall and winter 2014 hires, fewer of them will have the time in their logbooks, so you end up skipping down to the few who have prior experience.

The Sept 2015 guys will end up sitting on reserve for quite some time because as the FOs more senior to them upgrade, that will keep pushing them down on the CA list for their base.