Ethiopian airlines significantly enhances its recruitment processes

Ethiopian Airlines has significantly enhanced its recruitment processes following intensive training from online assessment specialist PSL.

ìAssessment centres are new to our country,î said Lia Belai, Assessment and Development Manager at Ethiopian Airlines. ìPSL has opened up our eyes to the different ways of assessing people.î

The African airline aims to achieve one billion dollars in annual revenue and to become Africaís World Class airline by 2010 and sees its people as an integral part of that vision.

Prior to working with PSL, Ethiopian Airlines adopted exactly the same recruitment process for each role they recruited for. Each year, the airline receive up to 1000 applications for their pilot, cabin crew and technician trainee schemes. Each applicant previously had to undertake a written examination together with a standard interview.

ìOur interviews were not structured, and therefore inconsistent, meaning we had a lot of fall out from our trainee schemes,î said Lia Belai.

PSL Consultants spent two weeks in Addis Ababa training staff in job analysis, competency frameworks and assessment centre design and administration. Candidates now have to do presentations, participate in group activities and undertake listening comprehension tasks, together with structured one to one interviews.

ìWe are now able to assess job relevant capabilities and behaviours that previously were not possible,î said Lia Belai.

Richard Alberg, Chief Executive of PSL said, ìThis has been a fascinating project for our consultants to work on. Ethiopian Airlines have totally embraced our ideas and expertise. They are now reaping the rewards with the quality of trainee they are choosing to recruit and will achieve significant cost savings, particularly in their pilot trainee scheme where they were making losses of around US$187,500 in failed recruits. They are now in a position to virtually eliminate this cost.î

The airlineís recruitment process has moved a long way since the initial call was made to PSL. ìPreviously there were always difficult selection decisions to be made. Now we are 100% sure we can say someone is a perfect fit for Ethiopian Airlines. Now we have the best people being recruited, we believe our 2010 vision to become Africaís World Class airline will be realised,î said Lia Balai.

For more information about PSL, please call 020 8585 2345 or email info@psl.co.uk