When I was there the only people hired with less than 1000hrs were those poached from Mesa. Skywest deliberately targeted those who went through the Mesa training program. Those pilots had to have 800 hours. Most of which were in the crj. These folks wanted out of Mesa, knew the rj, and were easy to train. They really didn't have too much experience but were trainable and a known entity.

Of course there were a chosen few who were skywest gate agents, rampers and flight attendants that had SGU blood in them. These folks were given interviews with lower flight times. Most had friends in the training center and had flown the Brasilia and RJ sims in the wee hours of the morning. Their total times were lower but they had been groomed by all of us since they started dumping lavs for flight time. All of them were excellent employees and turned out to be great pilots too.

I had a friend with connections who was hired with 1000/300. I had no connections, applied with the same hours, but didn't get interviewed and hired until I had 2300/1000. This was back in the late 90's. I do miss cocktails at Lofty's when SGU (CE) was paying the bill!!!!