I agree with your first statement 100%. As to whether that creates a “confusing hiring metric”, I’m not with you. A person’s skills & knowledge should be commensurate to their experience. When you’re hiring a zero experience guy, you can only assess his general aptitude to being taught/trained. When you’re hiring someone who’s already been trained & has real-world professional experience, his technical skills & knowledge are very much germane to assessing his overall aptitude. It would be ludicrous to evaluate a zero-experience prospect & an experienced 121 pilot by the same metric.
I don’t know why you think I’d be able to speak specifically to a second-hand rumor from a UND text thread, but obviously I have no ability to verify or invalidate anything you’re claiming. I can only point out that I never claimed to know that UAL is not hiring under-qualified candidates. I’m not a hiring or a training guy & I’m not connected to either of those worlds. I only ever said that it is possible to have diversity initiatives without compromising safety; and I’ve taken issue with people who claim safety & diversity are necessarily mutually exclusive. Perhaps you’ve misunderstood me to be speaking specifically when I was making more general claims? I’ve frequently stated that if UAL is hiring measurably unqualified candidates in the name of diversity that I’d be as upset as anyone else.