I think the silver bullet program is a Frontier thing. JetBlue has the "blue dart" and United has an official Chief Pilot meet and greet.

Delta never had any kind of official program like that, but for a long time you did have the ability to walk someone in (officially or not) and quite often if they were even close to being competitive (and appeared to have their act together) the odds of an interview offer were very high. That was phased out and eventually firmly prohibited. Its been replaced with the once a year app review in theory, but in reality that's nebulous at best because if your app was already reviewed and you weren't selected, it probably won't make a difference. If, on the other hand, your app hadn't been reviewed yet, its probably because you were in a lower "tier" and they weren't going to get to you for a while regardless because you weren't competitive in the first place.

The end result was to almost completely marginalize the line pilots from any ability to realistically recommend anyone. I think a good compromise would be some type of limited program like other places use, but it probably won't happen unless the "shortage" gets so bad they literally can't find pilots. But as of now, they have no use for, and don't want, 14,000 pilot recruiters because they feel they have all the applicants they can handle already. For now.