A bunch of you guys have landed a job this summer, and that’s great news. If the newsletter has helped in any way, it was my pleasure, but may I be so bold as to ask for your honest feedback? Good or bad, transparency is gold. Our facebook page is there for that. (click here to leave a review of this newsletter)

Now, although imagery season is about to start, marking the end of the biggest hiring wave for us low time pilots, it doesn’t mean hiring in general is over. Of course not.

Today, let’s talk about what’s new and what’s next. 

What’s new? 🗞️

• American Patrols hired new pilots the past weeks, after being radio silent the entire year. If you’re curious and missed the discussions on Facebook: Max and David chatting about the flight review with the Chief Pilot (link), David talks about his timeline to get the offer, the interview process (link).

FYI, their timeline varies. Some applied and got the offer within two weeks, others within two months, and most got in without a referral, just randomly applied.

If all they look at is total time, then everything came down to whether you applied on a good day or not. But I doubt that, I imagine there’s more to it, because they do ask for recency, solo time and C172 time in the initial application. So, although I did send an email in July saying API will be hiring in August, I didn’t think an exact timeframe to submit the resume would matter, yet it seemingly did.

Lots of speculations, I’ll ask around to have a definitive answer.

• At least 2 of the ProStar crew this season are readers of our newsletter! Their hiring process is pretty transparent, and is just as competitive as any other low time job. It’s just that for ProStar, unlike Skylens for example, you compete on your people’s skills rather than your flight experience.

Don’t get me wrong, there are minimums. But they are distinguished as minimums to apply and minimums by start-date. That means, it’s okay for you to apply with less than 400 hours or without your endorsements, as long as you can get them by October 1st.

What really matters is how you perform during the pre-recorded interviews, where they gauge your personality, see if you’d be a good fit in the ProStar culture. They got 280 applicants for 6 positions.

• And speaking of Skylens, it turns out they unexpectedly ran out of Tier 1 candidates and had to pull from Tier 2 kind of last-minute. They didn’t post about it on Facebook, but I guess it’s never really over until is.

What’s next? 🫵

It starts with a C and ends with FI.

I do not know much about the CFI market, I’ve only heard it’s not as easy as people make it seem to be, to get a job. I always thought the most logical way was to instruct where you get your ratings at. But I understand people move, or schools can be at capacity.

So as I’ll start looking into that path a little more, I’ll share what I find insightful.

Just a quick example of what the job search looked like for someone on Reddit. What’s happening in December? why call back then? That’s one of the things we’ll be figuring out.

In any case, the focus of the newsletter stays on jobs OTHER than CFI. I want to have more deep dives, find new companies and post about hiring opportunities.

By the way, in case you missed them, these were happening the past weeks, featuring the 3 ways to find jobs online: job boards, facebook groups and linkedin.

Anythings else? 🤔

We’re approaching The Road to 1500’s birthday. We’ve grown a bit in terms of subscribers, it’s harder to keep fostering the community aspect of the newsletter. But that is still an important goal.

So, I’ll also spend the rest of September answering the emails I haven’t gotten back to yet. If you have questions about any of the jobs I’ve posted about, or even just want to chat, I’m happy to help if I can.

Now, let’s wrap up this hiring season and face what we avoided for so long! Or maybe I’m just talking for myself?

Nah, I know I wasn’t the only one. 😆

Talk soon. 🫡