Frequently Asked Questions

Expert answers to our most common queries

You can apply for multiple roles at the same time with us (after all if we don’t allow it you can always apply via a competitor) but we will always ask you to make a choice about which role you prefer and will ask you to put your secondary application on hold if either airline is about to incur costs to assess you. For example, if you are invited to assessment abroad and an airline is going to pay for tickets to travel, we have a duty of care to ensure you are committed to that application before they spend anything. We hope you agree this is pretty reasonable.

The short answer is – usually no.

The long answer is that this depends on the airline entirely but might not be the airline’s choice! For example some Civil Aviation Authorities will dictate recency requirements for the issuance of validations or licence conversions and those usually involve X amount of take offs and landings in the past Y amount of days, OR date of last commercial pax carrying flight within the past Z number of months etc. Even if the CAA doesn’t dictate requirements most airlines will have a policy in their Ops Manual about prerequisites. In fairly rare cases, where there’s an acute shortage of pilots on a particular aircraft type for example, some airlines will accept pilots with date of last flight on type in the past 2, 3 or even up to 5 years! The requirements for recency must still be met but in these cases the airlines will pay for extra SIM sessions in lieu of flight recency and sometimes also extended base training to build up the appropriate number of touch and goes required.

Where you are applying for a job on a different aircraft type to what you currently fly, these restrictions can be lifted due to the fact you’ll be doing a brand new type rating. However usually there is huge interest in these Non Type Rated roles so airlines can, and do, apply a standard requirement for date of last flight on a ‘qualifying type’ within the past 6 / 12 months.

Unfortunately, within pilot recruitment there can be a misperception that your consultant has the same kind of bargaining capacity as a consultant working in what we call “General Recruitment”. This is not the case. When a person applies for a job through an agency – let’s say an office based role in IT or admin or marketing for example – the recruitment consultant can negotiate with the hiring company to agree a package and benefits. Due to the fact that there are entire fleets of aircraft at airlines with sometimes hundreds of pilots employed to operate them, airlines have (understandably) a consistent and inflexible pay scale and benefits offer for flight crews. A pilot joining an airline on “Year 1 salary band” will earn less than a pilot who has been working there for many years. It is quite unusual for pilots to skip a few years and join on “Year 3” or “Year 4” rates. Wherever that IS possible we will include that in our Job Description and overview of terms and conditions – it is usually based on experience or PIC hours.

In some airlines the salary levels are the same regardless of length of service but there are length of service or loyalty bonuses payable at set intervals in time – e.g. after 3 years, after 5 years, etc. Again, this means that candidates applying to work at an airline cannot avail of those bonuses or increments until they too have put in the time. As a recruitment consultant we always want to get the best possible new role for our candidate – if a candidate is not happy with the package on offer (and that includes roster, sector pay rates, travel benefits, etc. too of course) we would encourage the candidate to consider alternative roles altogether because airlines are ultimately not open to negotiations. If you want the salary from Job A and the roster from Job B then we’ll always try to find you a “fit” with Job C which combines both. If we don’t have something to match your needs and preferences we’ll tell you straight up! There is no point in us giving candidates false expectations about certain Terms and Conditions being flexible or negotiable when, 99.9% of the time, that is simply not the case.

In pilot recruitment it’s still fairly rare that an agency has exclusive clients. So you aren’t often forced to work with a particular agency if you want a particular job. Most of the time you’ll see 3 or 4 agencies offering to represent you for the same role(s). How to choose who to work with comes down to a few things:

Does the agency care enough to ‘meet’ you? Have you received a phone call or skype invitation? Do they want to get to know you? They should want to know who they are representing if they plan to do it well!
Is the agency honest with you? If they don’t tell the unvarnished truth about the jobs they represent, just start running! Not telling you the name of the airline they are hiring for is often a big red flag; but if they skim over the details of the negatives (let’s face it almost every job has them) then walk away. Equally, be sure that the agency is properly ‘managing your expectations’ by giving you reliable indications of process, timeframes, etc
Don’t use an agency who you aren’t prepared to work with. That means you have to spend your own valuable time preparing documentation, discussing the application, liaising re logistics of assessment, etc. Is this agency going to make that as painless and smooth as possible? Is this agency well organised and good at communicating?
Continuity of service is another factor – will you be able to build a rapport with your consultant or are you being passed from one recruiter to another depending on who’s got the time?! If you find yourself running through your work history for a second or third time with a new consultant then it’s probably time to choose a different agency.
Lastly, and most importantly, does this agency treat you with empathy and all that goes with it? Empathy translates into giving candidates thorough information (for example illustrated earnings and taxes / information about relocation, housing, commuting options, etc.) Empathy translates into best in class preparation support with briefings, practice interviews, practice SIMs even! Empathy demands you get regular updates from your consultant even if they have no news from the airline for you. Basically, a good agency will treat you how they would like to be treated if they were job seeking.

We have tried and tested ferry flight pilots that we’ve worked with for many years. These are usually pilots who exclusively do ferry flight work (retired for example) and therefore have great availability for projects which can be quite hard to predict a departure date on, or where an extended trip is required. From time to time (for example if a large fleet is being repossessed due to bankruptcy) we will add additional capacity to our ferry flight pool. New pilots joining our ferry flight pool are almost always Captains, almost always having some previous ferry flight experience, and with considerable hours on type (usually 5000 PIC minimum). We don’t accept speculative applications from pilots to join the pool but will reach out via our database whenever we need additional pilots so if you’re interested in this kind of work in the future for example, then it’s important to register with us.

It can be. It depends on the airline and the current market conditions. If there are huge numbers of pilots applying for a limited number of roles it is unlikely that the airline will be flexible with the ELP requirement as they frankly don’t have to be. However if there are just modest numbers of applicants and/or if you have really great English in practice there can be exceptions. For example in some countries / some airlines the ELP examiners are only qualified to issue a level 4 at most because that’s all that’s legally required! If you are a 5 or 6 in practice (subjectively assessed by us or by the airline) but only have a 4 on paper then sometimes we can make a case for an exception in your case – always at the airline’s discretion every time though.

If we have received feedback, even informally, about your performance we will ALWAYS pass it on. We are firm believers that if you’ve got an area to improve upon you deserve to know about it. However, in some cases airlines don’t provide feedback and in those situations we are as frustrated as you about why you might not have been selected. The first thing to bear in mind though, is that you are competing against a number of other competent pilots also applying for the role. So, it’s often not a case that you are not good enough to fly for the airline, but that someone else was deemed a better fit. Almost all airlines are looking for the top 10% of pilots to work from them and certainly no airline is looking for the bottom 10%. If airlines want to ensure that they get the best? one way they attempt this, and it doesn’t actually seem to make sense, is to interview ten to pick one – that way you can tell yourself you are getting the best 10%. Don’t take it to heart if you’ve not been selected. With odds like 1 in 10 as a general average success rate (and we’ve seen this time and again globally if you track all qualified applicants through to job offer stage) you might experience a few confusing “no’s” before you get that all important “yes!”.