So the August 19th Expo is in the books. It was a professional and layed back atmosphere, and a first class presentation. I got to see a lot of friends I haven't seen in awhile. They had a diverse group of 4 line pilots there, and 4+ Flight Ops people from the Senior VP down to Assistant Chief Pilot/Hiring Director. Each of these groups formed a panel that did an hour panel discussion. A couple of takeaway bullets:
1) Fedex has officially lowered their preferred turbine PIC to 500. It hasn't made it into the literature yet, but this came straight from the hiring department.
2) Personal Endorsements have gone from one every TEN years to one every TWO years.
3) Fedex intends to have more Expos around the country in the future. Based on the feedback from friends that attended there, I personally think it was a mistake to take it out of Memphis, but it's not my sandbox.
4) It was mostly a pitch to make people WANT to come work at Fedex. Even so, they didn't crush us with dozens of slides about pay and seniority. There were a few very meaningful slides on the subject (ie. 43% of the pilot group is topped out on the wide body pay scale). The largest share of it had to do with company culture which was actually one of my main questions going in.
5) The jury is still out on whether attending the Expo makes an interview invite more likely or not. They said that the group that was invited to the Expo had a spread of availability dates from Immediate to up to two years (some guys didn't even have an app/profile), and lightly insinuated that this was because they were going to be calling many of us, and knew they couldn't call all of us at the same time. I appreciated this thought process even if they never call any of us.
6) They accepted resumés during networking time at the end, but I sort of got the impression that this was simply to depressurize the conversation and get people to move on instead of hang around and make extremely awkward ass-kissing conversation. I get what Derg says about not chasing him into the bathroom with your resumé. It was hard to watch when the HR lady was just trying to get lunch at the buffet.
7) It sounds like the pilots have a healthy relationship with management. This goes back to the culture thing.
8) Military dudes can start expecting interview invites further before their availability date than in the past. The hiring people had been treating availability dates as 'no earlier than' interview dates. That is a huge faux pas, and a great way to lose a lot of applicants, and they figured this out recently.
9) They seemed genuinely unconcerned about either robots or Amazon.
There's a lot more, but I've already gone on for too long. Basically, if you're a dude who wants to walk out of the event with a great feeling that "they" are going to remember you and that you can directly correlate getting the interview invite with having attended, then I think this isn't the event for you in the future. If you are trying to get your hands around whether FedEx is a place you want to work (just beyond pay and "zomg widebodies for e'errrbody") then you'll find it good.
