Leave Nothing to Chance: Preparing for an airline interview

Let’s say you just received an interview invitation from XYZ Airlines—your dream company. But once you get over the initial euphoria, you notice you have less than two weeks to get ready. Your excitement quickly changes to panic as you realize that even if you worked 24 hours a day for the next 10 days, you won’t get it all done. “I wish I had started getting ready sooner,” you might think.

So you start making a list of all the things you have to do between now and 10 days from now: buy an interview outfit; check in with your referrals; get the gouge; practice the gouge; study for the written tests; schedule a sim check; lose those extra 10 pounds you’ve been meaning to lose for the past six months; perhaps get a physical exam and document any medical problems; make travel arrangements; schedule time off from your current job; find and review a copy of the application you submitted; write to request college transcripts, driver’s records, and airman’s records; plus anything else you may have forgotten.

“I’m not going to make it!” you begin to understand.

Typically, pilots take a step-by-step approach to job hunting—they wait to get through one gate before heading toward the next. However, this approach doesn’t work very well when it comes to interview preparation. Getting ready for an interview is a time-consuming and complicated task. Ideally, your preparation should begin the day you decide to pursue an airline career. Realistically, you should start preparing for your interview the day you start the application process. But most often, preparation begins the day you receive notice of an interview—right?

Obviously, preparing for the interview includes more tasks than you will be able to comfortably handle on short notice. Sure, you can get an interview suit, make travel arrangements, and schedule time off from work in one day, but what about the really important stuff like gathering your required paperwork? At minimum, you will need a copy of your airman’s record, college transcripts, and your driver’s record from every state in which you held a license. If you are really prepared, you will also have copies of your training and employment records.

It requires time to gather these documents, and in the case of training and employment records, you may need or want an outside source to help you gather these documents. So, if you are just starting out or are well on your way, listen up. Begin preparing for your interview now!

In general, getting the interview is based on the information provided on your résumé and employment application. Letters of recommendation also add points to your total score. You probably have already submitted a résumé or an employment application. While you are waiting for the results of that mailing, you should be actively gathering the documents you anticipate you’ll need, while at the same time conducting a background check on yourself. In doing this, you will significantly aid your overall interview preparation.

And although you may feel completely confident that your records are clean, finding out about a mistake on your records or some other unknown problem early on will give you the chance to make corrections in a timely manner and not delay your progress.

Likewise, if a known problem is confirmed through your background check, at least you know what the official record is and as such you will better be able to structure a tailored response and/or explanation, both on the application and during the interview. Furthermore, the background check may help you remember events you had long forgotten—events that may provide fodder for your interview. Remember, you must know yourself and know your history to be successful at the interview.

At minimum, your background check should include: FAA incident/accident report; driver’s record from the National Driver’s Registry; driver’s record from all states where you held a valid driver’s license; criminal record; and college transcripts. You may also want to consider obtaining training and employment records from your current and any previous aviation employer dating five years back. Be aware that it can take up to 30 days or longer to get these records. If you include your training and employment files, plan on 60 days or more.

The process for receiving FAA, driver, criminal, and education records is fairly easy if you know what to do. To obtain a copy of your FAA accident/incident report, you can fax your request to the FAA at (405) 954-4655. To request your driver’s record from the National Driver Register, write to:

NDR, NHTSA
400 7th Street SW
Washington, D.C. 20590

Since the NDR provides records only on serious infractions such as denials, revocations, suspensions, and DUIs, you must contact your state driver’s licensing division for other traffic violations such as speeding tickets and most other moving violations.

Your criminal record can easily be checked through the county court house, and your college transcripts can be ordered from whatever schools you attended.

Checking your training and employment records is more difficult. Your current employer will generally let you review training and personnel files; however, previous employers may be reluctant to provide you with these documents. Although you are entitled by law to see your files regardless of your employment status, once you leave a company, gaining access to your files can be a challenge. Any airline seeking to hire you is required by the Pilot Records Improvement Act of 1996 (PRIA), to request training, employment, and drug and alcohol testing records from any aviation employer dating five years back from the date of your application. Once this request is initiated, you will be informed and given the chance to review your records as well.

And although we highly recommend you do this, ideally, you want to see those records before your interview.

There are services that can do background checks, including the PRIA records check. Companies report it typically takes 60 days or longer to get responses to PRIA records requests, so obviously, waiting until you get the interview to initiate such a check simply won’t do.

Once you have obtained all of your records, review them carefully. Use the information to help you complete your employment application if you are at this stage in the process. If you find a problem, at least you have time to either fix it, or determine how you are going to deal with it during the interview. Either way, there will be no surprises and that equates to peace of mind.

In reviewing your records, pay close attention to every detail. Once you get to the interview, your employment application will be verified in your presence and during this verification you will be asked a variety of questions driven by the information provided on the application. Be prepared to talk about all particulars. Know that any problem area, such as a driving violation, FAA enforcement, or employment problem will be discussed. If you know that going in, you’ll be ready to handle anything that comes your way.

Perhaps the second most challenging task next to gathering the necessary documents is actually practicing for your interview. If you have never interviewed with an airline before, if this is an interview with your dream carrier, or if you have been unsuccessful in previous interviews, you should seriously consider interview coaching. Several professional organizations provide these services, including AIR, Inc., either over the phone or in person here at our headquarters in Atlanta. AIR, Inc. does not provide standard answers or condone rehearsing to the point of sounding canned in your interview. We do, however, advocate a level of preparation so that you can approach your interview with confidence and poise.

Most pilots wait until they have an interview before considering and/or scheduling a coaching session. However, you may want to experience an interview prep even if you don’t have an interview lined up. The advantages to this are many. Since the type of behavioral and technical questions asked are similar among airlines, a generic practice session will help you become familiar with the overall interview process, help you focus on what to prepare for well in advance of an actual interview, provide a solid foundation of interview skills on which to build and improve upon, and make the coaching session for the airline-specific interview more worthwhile when you do get your actual interview.

Interview coaching sessions are conducted in various ways. Although a practice session which is conducted on location, face-to-face, and videotaped is the most expensive and time-consuming preparation available, it gives you comprehensive audio and video feedback of your performance. You may think you sound and look good, but only a videotaped practice session can let you know if you need to work on your body language.

Once again, the more lead time you have to do this the better, because if during your coaching session a problem is discovered, you want to have enough time to make a positive change. If you wait until the last minute, first of all, you may not get an appointment since these sessions are usually scheduled in advance, and second, discovering a problem you have no time to fix can do a real number on your confidence.

Take this approach to your simulator check as well. Start early since most companies that conduct pre-interview sim checks usually book practice sessions weeks in advance.

Waiting until the last minute may result in you getting the only sim check slot available—maybe 2 a.m. on the morning of your 8 a.m. interview—or perhaps, no slot at all.

It should go without saying, but you should always stay in good physical and medical condition. It used to be that an extensive medical exam was on the front end of all major airline interviews and as such, pilots were more apt to maintain a consistent state of fitness—at least until they got the job. But today all of that has changed.

The medical now comes at the end of the interview, but passing the medical is still tied to a conditional employment offer. Yes! You can bust your medical exam and not get the job. Once again, preparation is the key.

We strongly suggest you take the time to get an executive-level physical exam even if you hold a current FAA Class I, or get an annual military Class II medical. The results for most of you will be good; however, you may find that your cholesterol is up, or that your blood and urine tests reveal hidden problems. Understanding what these problems are can help you either correct them, or at least document them so that you are prepared for the medical phase of your interview. Sometimes the solutions are simple: adjust your diet, stop eating poppy seeds, stop strenuous exercising right before the medical, or improve your hydration.

On the other hand, the solution may be more complicated, requiring the assistance of a medical advocate to help you overcome the problem and properly document the facts for the purpose of your interview.

Under normal circumstances, scheduling and completing a medical takes some time. Finding out you have a problem and possibly having to seek expert help in correcting the problem will take even more time—time you won’t have when the interview notice arrives.

You might be tempted to ask, “What’s to understand? I have good qualifications, so I should get hired.” Or you may believe, “All ‘they’ want to know about are the negative areas of my life,” or, “The purpose of the interview is to reject me.”

These are all common misconceptions many candidates have about the pilot hiring interview, but they clearly demonstrate a true lack of understanding of what the interview is all about. It may be hard to convince you but the interview is about one thing only—getting to know you as a person.

Receiving an invitation to interview is based on your qualifications—all of the elements that are keyed to published minimum and stated competitive requirements—but once you get to the interview, the game changes. Now the interviewers, both flight operations and human resources representatives, are taking a long, hard look at you to see if you would fit well into their flight department and within their airline’s corporate culture.

During the face-to-face questioning that forms the backbone of nearly all airline interviews, flight operations personnel will focus on whether or not you will be a good pilot. You may think your paper qualifications adequately prove this, and they do, but only to a point. A pilot interviewer is going to want to know if you are the pilot you say you are and that can be evaluated in several ways.

First, and perhaps most obviously, your logbooks will be reviewed very carefully. Next, you may be required to take a written test covering a full range of topics taken from the AIM, FARs, and ATP or Flight Engineer test preparation guides. You might also be asked to demonstrate your flying skills in a flight simulator. At some point, though, you will certainly have to talk about your flying experiences, discussing such things as emergency procedures, decision-making skills, and what you like most and least about your current aircraft. Along the lines of this type of questioning, you will be asked to describe what you would do in certain situations such as having the captain report to a flight with alcohol on his breath, or how you would handle a conflict in the cockpit.

Many candidates spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for the technical interview when in actuality the technical interview comprises only a small portion of the total process.

The main focus of an interview at nearly all airlines is what many refer to as the HR (Human Resources) interview.

The HR interview differs from the technical or flight ops interview in that the questions typically will be behavioral based; however, don’t be misled into thinking that only HR representatives ask this type of question. Since responses to the behavioral-based questions reveal traits about you such as loyalty, leadership, dedication to your career, decision-making skills, communication skills, and social interactions, the flight operations interviewers will ask similar questions, but with a crew resource management orientation.

Depending on the specific airline’s interview process, you may end up spending most of your time with a human resources representative. Other than your logbooks and perhaps verification of certificates and ratings, the airline’s HR department will screen all other paperwork you submit. You will be asked to go over your application line by line to verify and clarify information—and yes, this is a part of the interview process. Many candidates make the mistake of thinking this paperwork review is just a formality and not part of the actual interview. Beware—the person reviewing your application may ask questions such as, “Why did you leave this company?” or “Can you verify your activities during a certain time frame?” Your answers will very much become part of your interview evaluation.

Although the HR representative usually is not a pilot, he or she will be evaluating you in another area that is equally important to the company as your flying skills—namely your corporate fit, or in other words, your personality. Keep in mind, it does not matter that your personality has nothing to do with your technical qualifications or skills in the cockpit—you must be liked to get the job, it’s as simple as that.

For some reason, HR representatives get little respect from pilot interview candidates. There are plenty of stories out there to support this statement, but I would like to think that AIR, Inc. members and readers know better. In case you are among those who believe that having to answer questions from HR representatives is somehow beneath you, know that AIR, Inc. estimates that 70 percent of all rejected interviewees are denied by HR representatives.

Pilots sometimes feel uncomfortable dealing with HR personnel because they ask questions that are seemingly unrelated to the flying position for which the pilot is applying. It’s understandable to think, if you got the interview because of your qualifications, then that should also drive the interview—but this is a dangerous misconception. Believe it or not, even CRM-type questions can be considered behavioral since many of these questions relate to how you make decisions and how well you interact with other crewmembers as a peer and leader. The difference is that CRM questions relate directly to your behavior as a pilot and crewmember, whereas HR questions relate to your behavior as an individual and employee, usually in social settings outside of the cockpit.

Pilots are trained to be perfect. It’s instilled in young pilots from day one of training and in veteran pilots throughout their careers that a mistake can be deadly. Unfortunately, this line of thinking also leads to the next idea, which is that airlines hire only perfect individuals.

Talking about negative areas in your life, or characteristic traits that are viewed as less than perfect, is admittedly difficult. You might think that revealing a weakness of any kind will surely mean an end to your interview, but that’s simply not the case.

For instance, pilots who have DUIs in their pasts, who have been fired from jobs, and who have FAA violations and aircraft accidents or incidents on their records are still able to get hired—but only if they come clean about their personal situations.

So what gives? Hopefully, you are starting to realize that acing the interview has practically nothing to do with your piloting qualifications—it’s your performance and personality displayed during the interview that really counts.

Just as with your application process, preparation in all areas is vital to your success in an interview.

Thorough preparation for the interview will provide the confidence to let your personality shine through.

It helps to consider the interview as a forum for having conversation with another person. Of course you will be nervous—a lot is riding on the outcome—but airline recruiters know this and usually will go all out to make you feel more comfortable. And once you get past the initial nervousness, you should try to have fun. Yes, have some fun with the opportunity.

Understand that the goal of your interviewers—flight ops and HR representatives alike—is to hire you; not reject you. Their motivation to hire you is derived from the fact that they gain more pleasure and job satisfaction through offering you the job than in turning you down. If you aren’t prepared to let the recruiters get to know you, then you’re likely to be very disappointed in the end. Remember that what gets you to the interview is very different than what makes you succeed once you arrive. Your personality and performance will ultimately be the driving force behind the final outcome of your interview.

Chances are, you will be getting an interview—and sooner than you think.

Sure, buying an interview suit, or arranging to be off from work are minor tasks compared to trying to gather required documentation, scheduling an interview coaching session and simulator practice ride, or getting a physical. That is why early preparation is so vital. Start this drill now, so that you’ll only have to sweat the small stuff when you get your call.