Emirates Airline has received a massive 300,000 cabin crew job applications since last September when the Dubai-based carrier reopened recruitment for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
The airline initially wanted to recruit as many as 3,000 cabin crew to support its massive ramp-up in operations but now Emirates says that number isn’t even nearly enough.
From this month, Emirates will start the hunt for up to 6,000 new cabin crew, as well as thousands of other workers including pilots, customer service agents, engineers and ground workers.
“As we focus on recovery and further ramp up our operations, we are accelerating our recruitment drive with the objective to hire roughly 6,000 cabin crew positions during this financial year, from April 2022 to March 2023,” a spokesperson for the airline confirmed to The National.
“Since we launched our cabin crew recruitment drive in August 2021, we have received more than 300,000 applications from all over the world, demonstrating the tremendous level of interest in this role and in Dubai’s growing reputation as one of the best cities to live and work.”
Emirates is famed as being one of the hardest airlines in the world to land a job as cabin crew and aspiring candidates used to travel from country to country to attend in-person recruitment fairs where they would hope to impress one of the airline’s exacting hiring team.
The pandemic brought an end to mass recruitment events full of strangers in crowded hotel conference rooms but despite the lifting of physical distancing rules in many countries, Emirates doesn’t have any plans to go back to this style of hiring.
Instead, the recruitment process is now completely digital and candidates have to complete an online application and successfully pass a pre-recorded virtual interview before they can be assessed by a human recruiter.
Emirates recalled some workers that were made redundant at the height of the pandemic but many were either not invited back or chose not to return to their old careers.
It’s estimated that as many as 7,500 members of cabin crew were laid off as Emirates grounded its entire aircraft fleet in April 2020.
The airline recently announced that it was operating at 70 per cent of pre-pandemic capacity and hoped to reach 2019 capacity by next year. Capacity levels will gently rise to around 80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels by the end of the summer.
