What the selection panels will see

ladiesolo Trusted Member

You said application. Are you applying to a CTI announcement? Or did you receive the GeoPref email? If you're referrng to the GeoPref email, was it by way of a CTI announcement or PUBNAT? CTI applicants cannot choose enroute or terminal, they do not get a choice. CTI applicants cannot choose counties or specific facilities. If you are referring to a CTI announcement, what kind of comments are you looking to write? I'm sure someone else can help you with this one...

I'm just assuming you did not apply to a PUBNAT because the comments section on the GeoPref is quite visible when your completing them...

MTCTIGUY Trusted Member The 'Boro

Our referral list is apparently slightly different from the PUBNAT one. We don't get comments or en-route/terminal preference.

clb7 Rookie Florida

I was looking for a section on my CTI application to write comments. I didn't realize that CTI did not get an opportunity to write comments anywhere. What a shame. I also got my PUBNAT-8 geopref email but have not sent anything back yet. I guess I'll just have to send comments there.

SdN Junior Member

So if your numbers are correct then out of the 3,148 people who scored WQ there are 500 positions. Doing the math that puts it at 6 WQ candidates per open position. I competed with 50 other applicants for the job I have now so that's not too intimidating.

I saw another number floating around here, 300, as the amount of people they were going to hire from this panel. That would put it at 10 people considered per open position. A little bit more but not too bad given today's job market.

Also consider that they probably won't offer interviews for exactly 500 (or 300) people. I would imagine they would offer interviews to slightly more people than they would need to fill the positions as it's a given that not everyone will pass the medical/physical etc. evaluations that they have.

So if you scored WQ then it sounds like you have a decent chance of being offered an interview at the very least as long as you've picked at least one state that's going to be needing people in the next year or two. If you didn't then I'm guessing you are probably out of luck.

Does this sound correct to anyone else? Please excuse my simplistic approach. I'm just trying to get some sort of a perspective on the process. Good luck to everyone else. I imagine we've still got quite a bit of time to wait before we hear anything back from this October panel.

ladiesolo Trusted Member

Not really. If I apply for tower x and 125 people are on its referral list with only 2 spots open and you apply to tower y and 5 people are on the referral list with 2 spots open, the odds are not the same for the both of us...

Your post assumes that the same number of applicants are on each facility's referral list with each facility being slated to get the same number of trainees.

bradjackman Trusted Member Salt Lake City

Back to the list order... I was on a conference call for CTI students back in November and the lady at HR who actually makes the list was on the phone, with a bunch of other people who set up the selection panels. She said that she makes the spreadsheet in excel and then "randomizes it." How she does that, I don't know. I don't know if excel has some randomizing feature, or what, but that's from her own lips. Randomized. Now, if you can just break excel's randomizing algorithm and change your surname accordingly, you'd be set. Let me know when you do.

Rosstafari Daaaang. /X

This is the last time I'm going to go over this: believe whatever it is you want to believe. It doesn't describe anything about it in any of the reports put out by the FAA (or other gov't agencies) that I've read. Logically, it doesn't make any sense for them to sort names alphabetically for reasons that we already went over. If you want to contest that with all of the people with last names near the end of the alphabet, maybe you'll find a taker. Out of the people I know, there's a Ross, a Schultz, a Priest, a Putnam, a Morgan, an Orabona... come to think of it, there's only one who's even in the first five letters. Count me out, though, as I'm not interested in going around about this any longer.

...that.

TimShady Trusted Contributor Chicago, IL

I was just going by what I was told, and you were going by what you think. That's what made me mad. We'll consider it a mistrial and forget the argument ever happened. There doesn't seem to be any proof and it really doesn't matter much anyway.

Rosstafari Daaaang. /X

(Okay, one more...)

Dude, have you never spoken to someone from the FAA before? You'll be told a million different things, all from people who should know what they're talking about. In the three pages of this thread so far you've already heard at least two other stories that people were "told" from equally "reliable" sources.

You've got to dig deeper than relying what one person says if you want to get on top of this game. What you were "told" doesn't agree with plainly visible facts. So we've got:

A. What you heard once from a guy who says he works with the lists.

or

B. What doesn't appear in any of the official, government-issued reports covering the selections and doesn't agree with clearly visible results from past panels. It disagrees with what other, equally "reliable" people have said, and doesn't really follow common sense.

If you were presented these two options by someone else, which would you consider more believable? I know you're fixated on me not having any "proof", but you're the one insisting that the FAA is filled with Andersons and Benningtons and the burden for that lies upon you to show that it IS the case. You've got the word of some guy from a group that's wrong about the hiring process way more often than they're right. That ain't proof, brother, any more than it was when any of us have been told that we'd be training by (insert date), that (insert facility) is definitely hiring, that (insert application group) will be receiving their TOLs next month, or the litany of other things we've all been told incorrectly.

Anyway. My point is that, in my own experience, it pays to be skeptical of anything you hear from someone in the FAA, and if it doesn't agree with what you're seeing in other places, it's probably wrong regardless of who it came from. If I seemed quickly dismissive of what you had to say, sorry. It's the internet, and it doesn't carry tone well. What sounded conversational in my head may've came off as "DUMBASS YOU'RE WRONG" in yours.

k, done.

TimShady Trusted Contributor Chicago, IL

Well as I said before, I don't have proof of anything and I'm not claiming that I do. You seem to assume that selections are made by going right down the referral list and picking the first however many people they need. If that was the case then obviously an alphabetized list would be ridiculous and out of the question.

There's more to selections than going right down the list, otherwise why would they bother flying all these managers down to OKC for the panels if one HR person could take the first 20 people on Florida's "randomized" list and send them a congratulations email.