In The Same Letter:
Originally Posted by
SeeYa
We will now move our attention to the ERJ145 Captain open slots. Bid 19-06 should be out within a couple of weeks and in a preliminary look we could see pilots with a 2018 hire date being awarded an ERJ145 Captain slot. This concerns me that we will rapidly burn through First Officers in subsequent bids that have 1,000 hours of part 121 flight time needed to upgrade. My request to current First Officers is to fly as much as you can to get the hours. We may run out of 1,000 hour 121 First Officers to upgrade in late 2020. We are currently evaluating our First Officer flight time qualifications to determine the actual point. We do not want to be forced into hiring Captains “off the street” to meet our Captain needs.
Recruiting has leveled off in the last few weeks and we are aggressively blanketing social media, intensifying our college visits, doling out $2,500 employee referral bonuses, advertising and hitting the email campaign trail. We have a great story to tell about our growth, competitive pay within our peer group and domiciles. It is a very intense environment out there but we do have a lot to offer. Your assistance in making a positive impact with potential candidates that want to work here is greatly appreciated. New hires are part of the engine that will propel our continued growth strategy in all our aircraft types. Without pilots continuing to graduate at a 60+ rate each month, it will short circuit our planned growth in 2020 and beyond. Getting involved with the Recruiting department if you are an alumni from a college or university is always appreciated. We are in a battle to attract the “free agents” out there.
To increase our success with New Hire candidates, we have secured with FlightSafety a one week “pre-course” that covers general ground and turbojet sim training. Selected New Hires will attend this basic pre-program before they begin training at ExpressJet. Our goal is to match the ExpressJet ground and sim footprint for all candidates even if pilots lack recent currency or need a little help in understanding the airline environment. This “pre-course” will add significant costs, but we are hoping to make that up in (a) improved New Hire pilot success and (b) having our instructors focus on ExpressJet material – vs helping New Hires remedy core piloting skills. The first class will start this month and we will be gathering the metrics to judge the success.
The company CANNOT attract qualified applicants due to the bad QOL, pay and work rules along with no flow or real career progression.
They would rather pay for an expensive course to limp bottom barrel applicants along instead of attracting the best as Envoy, Endeavor, PSA, Republic and Skywest do.
Get pilots to recruit pilots (not F/A's) and improve the QOL (letter 2) stuff.