What do they want?

Concerning recruitment for cabin crew these are what I consider to be the following criteria for these specific airlines:

Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways: followers and not leaders. Shut up and smile. Play teamwork but don´t over stand. Doesn´t matter if you are not fluent in your English (spoken or written) they simply don´t care about it. Don´t ask questions (what they explain is not hard to understand) and don´t speak if you are not spoken. If you are woman hair up in a bon, bob cut doesn´t matter. Wear red lipstick and don´t apply much make up. Man, if you are gay don´t be, they don´t hire men that has gay attitudes. If you are a man don´t mingle much with woman during the recruitment session, they don´t like that. Also if you are Jew you won´t get hired and either if you have a Isreal entry stamp in your passport (so renew your passport before entering UAE).

Man and woman must reach a minimum of 212 meters standing in their tip toes with their arm fully extended quote: “this is not a grey area, it´s a must”.

Fact: Qatar Airways > lot´s of crew jump ship.

Fact: Emirates Airlines > if you make a complaint against a passenger after a flight you may loose the pay of that flight.

American Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic: they need people who may be proactive but silent at the same time. Is not a fact about followers and leaders as I mentioned before but they search for people who can be natural friendly but not over friendly to passengers and crew. They want people who know how to speak in general very good to excellent English and also they search for candidates who know a bit about the service industry before going into the airline industry. They highly appreciate candidates with management experience in hotels, hospitals and cruises.

The side back about this is that if they go into the opposite direction and loose their way and enthusiasm as crew they become “very slow” at performing tasks.

Malaysia Airlines, Singapore Airlines and ANA: education, education, education. Preference is given to candidates with a minimum university degree and also if they are multilanguage speakers (you don´t have to be necessary fluent in speaking, writing or understanding in all the extra languages). Commercial airlines in these particular region do care about if there crew have an education and knowledge about the world they live in, that is why education is a key point for them.

They also want followers and not leaders and this can be a sort of a sight back as many times they are not proactive at all. They program them to act and react in a specific scenarios but if something happens outside the box they may be in trouble because they stumble in what they should do.

(I don´t own the above picture)