Did you receive a job offer? – Yes

Home Did you receive a job offer? – Yes

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, , CJO Offered, Fedex Ride Reports, 0
Which Airline did you interview with? FedEx
How many days between invite, interview, and listed availability? Posted app 16 Nov 16, received the invite e-mail 15 Jan 17, interviewed 20-21 Feb 17 (was offered a date as early as 7-8 Feb), and my listed availability was “immediately”.
Did you receive a job offer? Yes
If you did not receive the CJO why do you think you weren’t chosen to continue in the process?
What is your experience? Military
Total Flight Time 2,000-3,000
Total Turbine PIC Time 1,000-2,000
General Overview of Experience 11-year C-17 dude (active duty, reserve, & currently guard); 3.5 years as a schoolhouse IP/EP with a year as a C-17 sim instructor; 100+ hours in the last 12 months when I got the invite.
How long did you have your application in before you received an invite? <60 days
Did you attend a job fair? No
Did you do anything special that triggered the interview invitation? No clue
How many internal recs did you have? 1-2
How long was it from the time of your invite to the actual interview? 4 weeks
Did you have any issues with logbooks, application or paperwork? My 12 month time dropped to 74 hours by my interview date, with my last flight being 31 Aug 16 (I have been off flying status with the ANG due to an injury) and that was one of the first things they asked about–question included when I should be back on flying status.
How did you prepare for the JKT/COG portion of the interview? RST–I made it trough about a third of the 15-day program, did the whole ground school, watched several videos from the library, and practiced the full cog test about 5-6 times.
Technical Test Questions Can’t quite remember specifics. Mostly aero with quite a few engineering & systems questions as well. A couple math questions and a couple nav/airfield lighting questions. Of the 60 questions there were maybe 10-11 that I wasn’t too sure about and came back around to look at (even changed a couple answers). Overall, I walked out feeling like I did okay.
What was the hardest technical question or content you experienced during the job knowledge test? It’s all a blur–sorry, I know that doesn’t help. I remember being a bit frustrated when ride reports just said “know the concepts”, but now I understand why they did. The questions were all just a little bit different from the exact questions asked in the RST tests, but the style of questions are the same. Take the RST tests to use as a gauge of how you’re doing–just understand that you likely won’t see those exact questions again. Know why you got a question wrong and, if you made a lucky guess, know why you got it right. Make sure you understand concepts and relationships (what goes up/down when something else goes down/up, how does this affect that, etc.).
Cog Test Great prep by the RST folks. I listened to the webinar after doing the practice test a few times–no need to change techniques if you find something that works, but I got some good value from just listening to the webinar to hear about some of the differences (biggest one for me was the fact that the real test used a stylus on a touchscreen…I had been using a desktop computer with a mouse–big change for a left-hander). Practice tests were around mid-700s initially and got up into the 800s (highest was an 897) and the interview cog test was a breeze thanks to the RST prep.
Cog Math Questions Again, great practice. I got crushed by the cog math during the early practice tests (I’m usually pretty good with math, but those are tough), so I changed my strategy. Initially, I would start reading from the top, like any word problem, and would just try working through it in my head–then I’d run out of time or panic and just pick a random answer. I started shifting to reading the last sentence of the problem (to figure out what they wanted), scanned the sentences in reverse order (typically the first sentence is nonsense, like “Danny loves to go shopping with his buddy on holidays”), and then just started using the answer options to find which ones fit. For example, for one of those questions that say something like “John & Bill together have 23 apples, but John and Carla have 25 combined apples…how many apples does each person have?”, I would look at the answer options and find one that had John and Carla adding up to 25. Usually, there was only one that even fit this and I could move on, but obviously you’d continue down the road if there are more than one option that fit. Hopefully some folks find that helpful. It worked for me…I got through 4-5 math questions on the actual test and I’m pretty confident they were correct.
HR Questions Can’t remember a ton of specifics. I had Bud & John and they were both great! They asked for my normal intro, had a couple questions about my records that I was anticipating (why it had been so long since I last flew and about some really terrible grades for masters classes on my transcripts). Asked a lot about fatigue (one I remember was to describe my day prior to a midnight departure) and some generic questions about professional development/goals. They were really big on asking follow-up questions (which is why I’m having such a tough time remembering). There was one TMAAT, but for the life of me I can’t remember it. Hypothetical was about a Capt who chose to shut an engine down during taxi, despite an uphill climb going into parking (Capts I flew with previously usually kept it running)…I ran through the motions, but sure enough he still wanted shut down, no limits get exceeded, so we get stuck. He admits I was right and asks me to restart. They asked several questions about how I handle it when we get to parking (“do you say anything–if so, what?”, “what if he just tries walking away without debriefing?”, etc.).
How long prior to the interview did you prepare for the HR portion of the interview? Started 1 month prior. Listened to the audio & video files twice (took notes), did 2 webinars and the top-off.
Which HR Prep service did you use and did it help? ECIC definitely helped. What was huge for me was going through the motions with them helped me remember my stories. A lot of my questions weren’t a direct request for a story, but having everything fresh made it easier to pull stories up when I needed to support my answers. SBI prep was clutch. It was really nice having an idea of what to expect going into that. It’s an awful experience, frankly, and I got a lot of value out of ECIC’s prep for that (especially in anticipating how they try to pull you off-track).
Any additional information you would like to add. They emphasized how important it was to them that people be themselves in the interview. I know everyone handles things differently, but I felt like ECIC was great in preparing me to have my thoughts together as I walked into the room, but once I got there I let myself be the same nerd I am in the jet, office, bar, etc. It seems like they’re wise to ECIC strategies and have good techniques to dig further and get you off your game if you’re just trying to follow the ECIC formula. They also mentioned that some of the big filters for their initial cut of applications are recent flying hours and whether people updated their apps in the last 30 days–so make sure you’re keeping up with that (especially as your flying hours change–that can affect your answer in a few different places throughout the app).
Is their anything you wish you could have done different to prepare you for this process? Start the tech prep sooner rather than later. That 15-day program takes way more than 15 days, especially if you can’t dedicate the majority of your day to studying (I’m a full-time guard dude, so days were busy) and you’re doing ECIC prep at the same time.
What can we do to improve our services? You’re doing great work and seem to be doing a phenomenal job adapting as interview strategies change–keep it up!
Concepts not covered by RST I can’t think of any.
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