How a white middle-class male became an oppressed minority (Part 2)

As I mentioned last week, the months following the open day were quiet. Very, very quiet. Martian mausoleum quiet. I thought the best way of getting this across would be to talk you through the e-mails they sent me over that extremely long period. However, I'll do the same thing that I did last week and sum everything up with bullet points the the end.

Etihad Airways Recruitment Team	Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 4:10 PM
To: trolleyY_dolly

Dear James

Thank you for your participation in our recent recruitment day.

Following your final interview, we are pleased to inform you that your application for the position of Cabin Crew has been successful.

You will now be kept in our holding pool and we shall notify you when we have a training course date available for you.

However, should we not be able to place you on a training course within the next 6 months you may be required to reapply for the position online.

This letter does not constitute an offer of employment and you should not make any decision to terminate your current employment based on it.

Your employment with us is still subject to the successful completion of the necessary clearances. Once we receive all clearances, a member of the recruitment team will be in contact with you.

Please note:

We can only proceed with your application into the next stage, once we have received all your documents.

If you could not provide all necessary documents on your assessment day, kindly forward them as soon as possible to ccrecruitment@etihad.ae

For our reference, kindly include your Name, Online Application ID (ID*******)
as well as the details of your assessment day into the subject line of your Email.


Thank you and best regards

Cabin Crew Recruitment

Hot diggity, I have my foot in the door! Now to practise doing the safety demonstration and pack my bags! I'm sure you noticed all the disclaimers and "re-apply in six months", but I was too busy dreaming of hunky pilots to notice all of that.

Etihad Airways Recruitment Team	Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 10:11 AM
To: trolleyY_dolly

Dear James, As a follow up to your recent interview for cabin crew held in Dublin on the 11th of June 2012; we require outstanding documents from you in order to be able to further process your application for employment.  Kindly arrange to send the following document so that we can move forward with the process; 2 service letters (please note service letters must be on company headed paper and should contain reference to dates of employment and mention position held) All offers of employment are subject to certain processes being completed; once this process is completed, we will be in touch with you. Please be aware that this additional processing can take up to 3-4 weeks once we have received all your necessary information. As we cannot guarantee employment for you at this stage, please do not resign from your current job until you have signed and accepted any draft offer received from us at a later date. Should you have any questions in the interim, please do not hesitate to contact us. Kind regards, Cabin Crew Recruitment I wouldn't know what a "service letter" is if it jumped up and bit me.  I'd be all like "agh, what is that mysterious biting thing!?"  I duly harassed my friendly current and previous employers until they gave me some pretty pieces of paper. Now folks, I need you to check the date of the next e-mail carefully.  Etihad Airways Recruitment Team                    Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 11:30 AM To: trolleyY_dolly Dear James,  I hope this email finds you well.  Currently your application with Etihad Airways is still pending as we are missing the email details of two reference contacts.  Please can you provide us with the name and professional email address of  previous or current employers who we are able to contact immediately in order to complete the reference checks on your file. Please do not provide the email of your current employer if you do not wish for them to be contacted now. Emails must not be yahoo/ gmail or hotmail accounts. I would be obliged if you could please provide me with the missing information by the 9th of August. Unfortunately failure to provide reference details may result in the termination of your application. I look forward to your reply. Kindest Regards Cabin Crew Recruitment Do not adjust your monitors. 44 days of radio silence. In the desert-island-survival movie of my life, my wife has re-married and my children have long-forgotten me. Who will teach them the art of mindlessly insulting strangers over the Internet? I received this e-mail a day before I was due to visit my girlfriend in Korea for three weeks. Imagine a headless chicken that has been told that if it can run in four different directions at once, it will earn back its head. Over the course of 3 hours I re-sent my references to Etihad, discovered that one of said references had taken extended leave, pleaded for a new one over the phone and in person, re-sent the new one and confirmed that Etihad had received a competed assessment form from both references. All while working in a cinema where we weren't permitted to use mobile phones. I was making phone-calls to confirm that all of my odious little ducks were in a row while boarding the plane. Etihad Airways Recruitment Team                   Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 3:35 PM To: trolleyY_dolly Dear James, We have implemented a new security form which all new joiners will have to fill. I understand that you have already filled one, but as per procedure this new one has to be filled. I have attached the form for you, once you have filled all fields required, please send it back to us. We apologize for the inconvienience. Best regards Cabin Crew Recruitment At this point, I didn't know what to think. Did this mean I was back to square one? The security form was one of the first things I filled out back in June as part of my visa application. I was told that it shouldn't hamper my stagger towards gainful employment. In hindsight, having been exposed to the ponderous machinery of U.A.E bureaucracy, if I'd known then what I knew now I would have forever given up on the dream of serving drinks at 35,000 feet. Unfortunately folks, the paper trail stops here. For some reason I can't seem to lay hands on the ensuing e-mails. I had to re-scan my passport and fill out a bunch of forms, but in the last few days of August, I got a wonderful phonecall asking when I would like to start. More e-mails followed - workbooks, manuals, more paperwork and finally my ticket to the desert. I flew out of Dublin on the 25th of November, waving goodbye to my family, pork and Smithwicks Ale, and began my training two days later. The Wait For the vast majority of you, it will be a wait. Unless you speak a language that the company is currently looking for - keep an eye on what routes they are expanding, or if any new routes are opening soon - you will have to join the queue. Arabic and native English speakers are always in demand. Make sure all your documentation is in order. That means translations into English or Arabic and high-quality scans of your various documents, and referees who know that you have given out their contact information and are willing to keep a watchful eye for Etihad e-mails. Check your e-mails daily. You never know when they might need clarification on something. If you're worried and looking for answers, don't e-mail ccrecruitment@etihad.ae, This is the generic e-mail address, and it will take a long time for you to receive a response. Try and get the chief recruitment officer's e-mail on your evaluation day, and  remember that in Abu Dhabi the weekend is Friday-Saturday. Keep in touch with your fellow holding pool hopefuls! Exchange e-mails, keep an eye on cabincrew.com and check Facebook to see if there is a recruitment group. If you have any questions or worries, stick a comment below.

How a white middle class male became an oppressed minority (Part 1)

If you somehow found your way here, that means you're extremely desperate for advice. You might have been on a waiting list for a month or two. Or three. You probably tried looking for help on cabincrew.com, and found only an excellent source of "novelty" degrees, false passports and brave attempts at the written word. Therefore, I thought I'd begin with a run-through of the application process for Etihad Airways, and why you should stop panicking and cross your fingers. Put off by the wall of text? Skip to the end for some tasty bullet points!

My story begins on a typical Irish June. The rain blasted against the windows as a I hid in my room. It had taken me three years, but I had forgotten about the most popular post-secondary school question - "what are you going to do next?" As I'm the kind of person who has trouble deciding what to have for dinner, one can imagine how this question vexes me, and it had started to rear its ugly head again. For lack of anything else to do, I decided to search jobs.ie for anything that wouldn't involve me bothering strangers with Sky subscriptions or taking a slice of charitable donations as a "chugger", a delightful term for those nice young people in matching jackets that cheerfully assault passing unfortunates with the most first-world of weapons - guilt.

Sure, spend your money on flannel shirts instead of STARVING CHILDREN. Or STARVING PUPPIES.

Because this is the Era of the Internet, and I am incapable of doing one task well but heartily enjoy doing several badly, I looked for flights to see my girlfriend in Korea. On the Etihad Airways website I saw a listing for a recruitment day in Dublin. Like most post-grads I harboured a vague desire to travel, and it happened to fall on a day off from my then-career as a popcorn scooper and general sweeper-upper at the local cinema. I dusted off my C.V, pulled together the laundry list of required documents and fruitlessly Googled "Etihad interview advice". Oh well, I thought, it can't hurt to try.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into the meeting hall was the surprisingly even gender divide. I was handed an application form and a label with a number.

127. And I was over half an hour early.

In your face number 128!

Apparently the final tally of hopefuls was almost 250. I dutifully filled out my form - noting with some concern a space for "letter of permission from father or husband" for the womenfolk - and brought it forward. I was cross-checked about my tattoos and lack thereof, and with a slight grin all 6' 4" of me was sent for a "reach test". After that little formality, we settled in our seats and were introduced to the wonderful world of Etihad Airways.

I knew that they were putting a spin on things, but it still looked like an excellent job. Accommodation and health insurance covered, all sorts of travel benefits for me and my family, and a rather dashing uniform. What else could a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed prospect-free graduate hope for? This turning point was followed by a laughable English test, and the even more laughable notion that being a native English speaker is a marketable skill.

Finally, whitey catches a break.

A brief break while those dratted foreigners were weeded out, and we moved on to the next stage - roleplay. Come on now, no sniggering down the back. I was handed a little slip of paper detailing my exciting imaginary job as a waiter in an ill-fated restaurant that had seen fit to put me in charge for the day, and reminding me that referring to "official policy" would result in slow castration with a dessert spoon. My interviewer complained that her children had been served cold food. Ignoring the rather pertinent fact that these children were invisible, I turned on my charm and flung as much free crap as I could think of at her.

OHMADAMSOVERYSORRYHOWABOUTSOMEMOREBREADWHILEYOUWAITANDPERHAPSAROUNDOFDRINKS

Following several minutes of anxious waiting, a list of names were called out in the time-honoured tradition of the TV talent show. To my happy confusion, mine was among them. We were ushered into another room, and given the good news with a rather pleasant request to remain calm, as a significant number of our new friends were being given the bad news. Some of them had travelled from as far away as Toronto for a shot at this, the daft buggers. This heart-warming moment was followed by some free time for lunch, which I spent wandering in the sun and avoiding the temptation to go to an excellent burrito place nearby.

After returning, we were split up into groups and assigned a strange task. Given a collection of about 40 index cards with seemingly-random words written on them, we had to group them in threes by category - for example, gold-silver-bronze, banana-apple-orange and so on. Then, we had to create a story using all the words, a task that only people with great teamwork can accomplish apparently. We spun an epic tale of an Olympic competition between planets, and once again my name was called out. The merry band of misfits had been pared down from 250-ish to roughly 25, and there was only one other handsome y-chromosome-carrier. Interview times were distributed, and in a foolhardy grab for positive attention, I took the earliest slot at the ungodly hour of 8 in the morning.

By some freak chance, I my interviewer was male, Irish and had grown up just down the road from me. The interview was pretty similar to any other interview, with a heavy slant towards personal experience working with diverse teams and dealing with difficult customers. I had done a little research about the company, had removed all dirt and debris from my person and had given the impression that I didn't have a side career in axe murder - what more could they ask for? A few days later, I received an e-mail congratulating me on being placed in a holding pool, and assuring me that I would be put in the first available course. That was on the 14th of June. The reason I didn't start until the 25th of November will have to wait for another time.

I hope this little...thing was helpful! For all the meat without the surrounding waffle, check out the bullet points below.

Open Day Process

• Smart business wear. I'd recommend putting your hair up and wearing a skirt for the women, it'll give them a good idea of what you'll look like in uniform. Also, research the company a little - find out how many destinations we fly to, new or pending destinations, how long we've been operating for, all that good stuff.
• Registration and reach test: be honest about tattoos, as it will come back to bite you.
• Introductory video, questions and answers, written English test: native speakers, make sure you don't get too cocky - read the damn thing over!
• Role-play: for all that is good and sweet in this world, DO NOT REFER TO "POLICY". Listen, smile, apologise, offer an alternative and a "sweetener", a little bonus to cheer them up.
• Group session: listen to everyone's opinions. If you speak over someone, apologise. Do little things, like pass around pens.
• One-to-one interview: expect lots of questions about your personal experience, specifically about difficult customers, conflict within teams, times you received good and bad customer service, the difference between good and great customer service. Typical interview stuff, really.

Disclaimer - the views expressed here are not necessarily the views held by Etihad Airways. I am not an official spokesperson for Etihad Airways. As with all advice on the Internet, take what I say with a Dead Sea worth of salt.