Ultimately it's not our choice, it's the opinion of the HR department that matters. Look at what was recently discovered about fedex's process, with internal recommendations apparently counting against applicants. We don't get to choose what any particular HR department counts as positive or negative, all we can do is choose which company we want to work for and try to meet their requirements. Delta has their process that appears to be a fairly rigid stack of swiss cheese you have to pass through. SWA wants to hire people who will be proud to be a part of the SWA family. Frontier wants to hire people who are cool with a 2 year training contract, while spirit hires on personality and seems to rely on a tough training program to weed out people who can't keep up. United hasn't called anyone for 6-9 months so who knows what they want We don't have control over much in the hiring process, but it ought to be pretty clear what kinds of pilots each company is looking for, based solely on what their hiring process looks like. Choose wisely and keep applying for your "dream job" because you can't possibly know if/when you'll ever meet their criteria until suddenly you do.