Everyone wants to be a Virgin, but who's got time to check if they're lying?

By Matthew Parker, Group Managing Director for StepStone Solutions

Ask anyone in senior management at an airline what their biggest single responsibility is and they'll tell you it's the safety and security of passengers. Now of course, there has never been a time when that wasn't true, but since 9/11 and other terrorist attacks occurred, safety and security have become the buzzwords du jour for airlines.
Paradoxically though, a continual need for workers to sustain the engines of the air travel system makes maximising security and safety painstakingly process orientated, costly and hard for organisations to achieve all of the time.

Airlines often have to employ vast numbers of people on an annual basis, and because they have to fill so many lower skilled positions, often suffer very high churn rates. Take organisations like BAA and their European counterparts Swissport Schweiz and Avinor, who need to recruit staff for the retail concessions within their airports and ensure these people are security checked to the highest levels. This issue of having to complete high volume security checks is further magnified at the airlines themselves. Many carriers, as a consequence of having invested so heavily in their brands and corporate image in order to fill their seats with fare paying punters, attract thousands more applications from would be employees than they have jobs to fill. BA and Virgin are just two examples with this glamorous allure; everyone wants the cachet of saying they work for their organisations. And so the applications flood in (Virgin gets 130,000 applications for 2,200 vacancies advertised annually!) But for the airline, striking a balance between maintaining security and passenger safety, while at the same time offering potential recruits a pre-employment experience that befits their brand promise, is a tricky one to achieve. Using technology can go a long way to automating this, and at the same time, reduces costs, administrative burden and applicant processing times.

Virtually all the major airlines and aviation related businesses now use IT to manage all or part of their HR related activities, in some cases, sharing candidate data across 4 different continents.

For all of these businesses, their number one priority from a safety perspective is ensuring they are not hiring someone they shouldn't be. At least one of these organisations does this by actively filtering for continuity of employment. Past experience has shown that one of the best ways to screen out candidates who pose a potential security risk is to look for gaps in their work history. Any individual is more likely to be a threat if he or she has unexplained gaps ranging from 2 weeks to 8 months in their CV. Having technology which can automatically flag these potential problems to a recruiter and thus avoid the potential for human error is extremely powerful and forms an essential element of the recruitment process.

Virgin considers having an automated security checking feature a major plus, and it proved especially useful when they completed their recent roll out in Nairobi. Apparently it is quite common practice in some parts of Africa for people to supply false or inaccurate information when applying for a job, and even send someone else to attend an interview on their behalf, if they think that person stands a better chance than they perhaps do! When Virgin launched in Africa, they were up against such challenges, and had to recruit staff across every job function. Having the capability to stringently screen applications meant they were effectively able to have their entire ground staff operational within 8 weeks, an amazing accomplishment in any industry, but especially for an airline.

Whether the current economy can sustain another budget airline is debatable and probably best left to the likes of Ryanair and Easyjet to argue out. But, if anyone out there fancies a punt in the aviation world, at least technology exists which supports hiring the right people in record time, leaving more resources available to get the business off the ground.

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