UPDATE: Emirates has now reopened cabin crew recruitment for everyone (Sunday 28th January 2018) – The official link can be found below.
If you’ve been eagerly awaiting recruitment to reopen for Emirates cabin crew then you’ve no doubt already seen the announcement that the airline will start hiring again “soon“. But depending on how closely you’ve been following events, you may also have seen some candidates have already completed an online application and even taken part in a video interview.
But don’t worry – you haven’t missed anything and if you see any links to an online application, you should treat it very cautiously. For the time being, Emirates has not reopened cabin crew recruitment for everyone and you should continue checking the official careers website here (we’ll also update the site as soon as recruitment reopens).
However, as Emirates “reassesses” its resourcing levels, HR managers have been back in contact with candidates who were previously successful at Final Interview – but then informed their applications had “expired”.
If you might remember, Emirates suspended its cabin crew training courses at short notice in early 2017. There were many candidates who had already received the famous ‘Golden Call’ but were still waiting for formal offers of employment or a course start date. Some had been waiting since June and July 2016!
As the recruitment freeze dragged on and on, those candidates were told their applications had “expired” – they would have to reapply from the very beginning if they were still interested in working for Emirates.
It turns out the recruitment team has had a change of heart. This isn’t dissimilar to how Etihad Airways has been managing its own recruitment freeze – keeping shortlisted candidates on permanent hold while they wait for training courses to become available.
Our sources tell us there are about 800 candidates who had successfully passed the Final Interview and were waiting to move to Dubai. Emirates is now asking these candidates to update their online recruitment profiles and complete a pre-recorded video interview.
The process will allow the recruitment team to see if those candidates are still a match for the airline’s needs and gauge how many are still interested in the job. It also has the added benefit of testing the video interview process and fine-tuning the interview questions that are used.
Again, we don’t yet know how many cabin crew Emirates plans to hire – there’s every chance the airline could find enough new crew for its needs from the pool of expired candidates.
There’s talk Emirates will be in a position to restart ab initio training courses in April – and with it, further recruitment open to all. For now, however, we need to give the recruitment team a little time to get things organised. The HR department was shrunk last year with some staff made redundant and the plan to hire new recruits came as a bit of a shock to everyone.
Hopefully, we’ll all know more very soon.
